What is this site for?

Confession time: I think I’ve started and stopped and restarted working on this website about a half dozen times in the last two years and never got to a place where I wanted to hit publish on any of it. A big reason for that was a simple (and common) excuse: I was busy. 

I was working a full time job where, more often than not, my work days started at 7 AM and didn’t stop again until 9 PM, breaking only to make dinner or go for a quick midday run to try and maintain some semblance of wellbeing. I bought a house with my then boyfriend and shortly after got engaged. I spent a year planning and then throwing our wedding, an incredibly fun but often stressful and time consuming process. I had a beloved pet get sick and pass away.

I don’t have that excuse anymore. Recently, my pace of life changed dramatically. I quit my corporate job without another one lined up – something I thought I’d never do. Now, I find myself with more time than I’ve ever had as an adult. And yet, I’ve found myself starting and stopping and starting this website again for an entirely new reason.

Our world seems to be changing at a faster and faster pace. The last couple of years, in particular, feel like an entirely different evolution of the change monster thanks to AI, which, on its own, has evolved dramatically in just two years. While there are arguments about whether the rate of change is overblown – if it just feels more accelerated due to the nature of change itself – as a Millennial who has lived through multiple “unprecedented times” or “once in a lifetime” events, I can’t help but think that change is indeed escalating. 

None of us can go a day without seeing headlines like:

• AI Cited In Nearly 50,000 Job Cuts This Year As Tech Giants Accelerate Automation

• These Jobs Will Fall First As AI Takes Over The Workplace

• Duolingo Says AI Completed Work In 12 Months That Took Humans 12 Years

• AI Is Eliminating Jobs For Young Workers

• AI Is Changing Work – The Time For Strategic Upskilling Is Now

• Big Tech Is Paying Millions To Train Teachers On AI, In A Push To Bring Chatbots Into Classrooms

And on it goes...

Knowing that, I can't help but wonder, is anything I have to say still relevant? Are the lessons I’ve learned and the skills I’ve developed going to be useful in the next three years? Hell, even in the next year? Beyond that, there’s even the question of why write something when there are thousands of other people out there writing content of their own. Do I have anything new to say or add to the mix?

I’ve spent hours thinking this over while I’ve gone on runs, cooked dinner, painted a bathroom and living room as well as a number of other brain-free tasks, and at the end of it all, my answer to those questions is a bit of a shrug. 

I believe some of what I can share will stand the test of time – thoughts on ways of working, how to work with business leaders and be useful to them, or how to ask the right questions to drive smarter, more interesting results. Things that are more about how to think more critically as opposed to how to do a specific task. 

On the flip side, my advice or knowledge on a specific tool or skill set may not be relevant for long. In my last job, I wrote an online SQL 101 course from start to finish, delivered live training sessions and spent countless hours helping less experienced analysts troubleshoot errors and query issues. Will most of them need to be able to write queries from scratch five years from now? Or will AI be smart enough and reliable enough (i.e. no hallucinations) by then that all analysts will need to know is how to ask the right questions? More likely the latter.

That being said, AI for the time being is still quite narrow in its capabilities. Analysts who can think critically about business needs will still need to know how to write complex, creative queries. And if you’re like me, you still may want to know the method behind those basic queries happening behind the scenes your AI Agent is using to deliver up last month's KPI performance or those YOY trend rates that you need to plug into your board deck. Therefore, maybe we can still find some value in knowing the “old way of doing things” as many of the skills I have will inevitably be labeled one day. 

To the question of whether or not anything I have to say is net new or truly unique, I would shake my head and say, not really. My aim with this website isn’t to revolutionize anything or invent a better wheel. I will happily acknowledge that everything that’s in my head is something I learned from someone else who already came up with the solution or the framework or the idea many years ago. 

Nevertheless, my plan is to push forward. 

While I don’t have some wholly new idea or framework that I want to share with people, what I do hope this website can be is be useful – a kind of corporate compendium of strategic and analytics resources.

What I’ve gained in my professional life thus far is exposure to a lot of different things. What I find most difficult now is remembering and tracking it all down. As much as I pride myself on being an expert Googler, finding and re-finding the same resources over and over is inefficient, not to mention annoying as algorithms and rankings continually change how easily or difficult it is to find things. I hope that in building this website, I can save not only myself but other peers a lot of time and effort in finding what should be common knowledge and tools. I may sprinkle in my own perspective or experiences alongside those resources, but beyond that, I am simply here to gather, organize and share.

What if no one else ever looks at this website or finds it useful? Again, I shrug. At least I’ll have a repository of resources and references for myself to turn to when I need to find that one link to that article that has that framework / info on that one thing that I need…