Tris J Burns 🔥

Trisjburns.com

I work with data professionals looking to supercharge their careers and grow into influential and unstoppable data leaders.

Data Leadership Coach

Strategies For Effective Data Leadership

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Writer

Pizza Hut Digital Ventures

Headed up the PHDV Data and Analytics Function for PH's Global E-commerce assets.

• Introduced a culture of data driven experimentation and CRO
• Provided accurate and timely ecom business insights for C-Suite and external stakeholders
• Managed a team of 6 talented analytics across various disciplines within E-commerce Data and Analytics
• Provided product data analysis that drive a data first approach to product management

PHDV is Pizza Hut International’s E-commerce platform.  As Global Head of Analytics I am responsible for ensuring the entire organisation is data informed and driven as we build and scale our E-commerce strategy in over 100 markets around the world. 

Originally run as an internal startup, I joined PHDV as one of the first 25 employees.

As a member of the senior leadership team I help facilitate organisation-wide goal-setting via OKRs, planning and decision making, and ensure these plans are executed on time and on budget. 

In support of this I provide accurate forecasts and target setting for the business. I keep team members and C-Suite stakeholders informed by delivering regular business performance and strategy updates. 

I lead several strategic initiatives including our Conversion Rate Optimisation and Personalisation programs. These streams of work require me to work very closely with engineering, design and product on a daily basis. 

Since starting with PHDV I have grown my analytics team from just myself to now 6 analysts across multiple timezones.

Global Head of Analytics

Touch Surgery

By being the central nervous system for med-tech startup Touch Surgery’s sales and account management teams, I ensured the business always had a finger on the pulse of our users. I provided actionable insights backed by robust analytics that saw the number of partner institutions grow by over 100% exceeding EOY target by 50%

• Provided app analytics of user behaviour and engagement which enabled account management teams to prioritise accounts with greater potential for future revenue

• Developed and applied engagement metrics to identify opportunities for growth among new customers as well as value add amongst our existing client base

Business Intelligence and Strategy Analyst

Bank of America Merrill Lynch

I turned ‘excel-crashing’ sized data sets into a suite of slick sales management reports ensuring managers who don’t have time to get their own coffee could pick up one of my reports and immediately understand exactly what is going on in their business. The margin for error on the trading floor is 0 and the insights and recommendations made in my reports drove the direction and outcome of multi-mullion dollar deals

• Created and implemented a Resource Efficiency Ratio that measured the value of the resources clients extracted from the bank versus how much revenue they brought through the door. These insights empowered our FX Hedge Funds business to slash costs and improve forecasts. My report was implemented globally

• I worked closely with the new head of the Rates and FX Hedge Funds businesses as the two lines were merged. I produced accurate and timely client analytics reports to ensure solid relationships were maintained with some of the world’s most established Investment Banks and Hedge Funds

Snr. Analyst Fixed Income Global Sales FICC COO

Santos Ltd

I was the Project Lead and Subject Matter Expert for the implementation of a $5 million Stakeholder Relationship Management system built on the Microsoft Dynamics CRM database

• Successfully delivered the project on time and on budget by collaborating across multiple internal business units and with external stakeholders. Business user system interaction increased by more than 300% on previous solution. The project was cited as an example of excellent project team and business integration and cooperation

• The development of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) requiring mathematical manipulation of data to produce various ratio based indicators that provided qualitative insight into stakeholder sentiment towards the Project

Santos is a major oil and gas exploration and production company with interests in Australia and Asia. Santos has total assets of $22.3 Billion, annual sales revenue of $4 Billion and over 10,000 employees. The Santos GLNG Project was an $18.5 Billion Coal Seam Gas to Liquid Natural Gas infrastructure construction and LNG export business with joint venture partners Total, Petronas and KOGAS

Business Analyst

Institute of Continuing and TESOL Education - University of Queensland

• Various financial management roles such as maintaining and investigating international student accounts, preparing daily banking reports as well as the maintenance, improvement and administration of the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system used by customer service and administration staff members.

• Development of key relationships with relevant stakeholders from across the business.  Act as liaison to external bodies such as consulates and embassies, government departments, sponsoring bodies, members of the public and commercial dealers.

• Worked in a concurrent role as the Group Leader providing interpreting support and coordinating educational programs on behalf of Japanese university students and teachers.

Administration and Student Support Services / Group Leader for Educational Programs

Data is largely viewed as a technical challenge rather than a business one by leadership teams across industries. This causes them to be disengaged from data’s potential as an effective business driver and to focus solely on technical initiatives and solutions.

Through my data leadership coaching and group facilitation, I help data leaders and leadership teams develop robust data-centric cultures to help them increase accuracy and velocity around decision making to maximise ROI from strategic initiatives.

I combine my extensive career experience as a Global Head of Data within a Fortune 500 alongside my experience as a consultant, coach and mentor to work with leaders to develop a company wide, data-centric culture that will ensure individuals and organisations are in the right place to maximise their growth potential.

I am deeply passionate about technology and startups and have been endorsed by Tech Nation as a Global Talent in Tech. I speak frequently at tech events and have experience as a founder having started two marketplace businesses.

Director

A good data team is the beating 🫀 of business.

If you're part of a team that feels like it isn't...

Then the problem might be one of these...

𝟵 𝘀𝗶𝗴𝗻𝘀 𝗼𝗳 𝗮𝗻 𝗲𝗳𝗳𝗲𝗰𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝗱𝗮𝘁𝗮 𝘁𝗲𝗮𝗺:

1️⃣ Not treated as a service desk
2️⃣ Is able to say no to low value tasks
3️⃣ Is business literate and very curious
4️⃣ Knows that tech solutions come last 
5️⃣ Has strong people engagement skills
6️⃣ Is consulted early, not late in a project
7️⃣ Able to prioritise strategy aligned work
8️⃣ Knows how to sell its accomplishments
9️⃣ Collaborates widely with business teams

Anything you think I've missed here?

Let me know in the arguments below 👇🏻

----------------
Hi, I'm Tris 🔥  For more hot data leadership tips, subscribe to my newsletter: Strategies For Effective Data Leadership via the button up top!

★ Strategy & Data Leadership Coach | Helping leaders maximise the potential of their careers!

It’s lanyard official! 

I’m at the Chief Data Officer Exchange  for the next 2 days and it’s already off to a killer start! 

I’m hosting a couple of round tables for senior data leaders, but apart from that, I’m really keen to learn and hear from some really impressive and influential data leaders from the Banking, Financial and Insurance industries. 

This is conference number 1/2 for me this week! 

Gonna be networking like a machine! 😮‍💨

I was a sh*tty data leader when I first became one. 

I thought my job was to answer the endless questions of folks around the business and that if I did that, I was killing it. 

But as a endless optimiser, I quickly saw little value in that.

👉🏼 The answers I gave didn't solve problems.

👉🏼 They were rarely used to make decisions. 

I finished every day feeling like I'd been endlessly busy but achieved the grand total of sweet FA. 

Somewhere deep down, I knew the career I'd chosen had a deeper calling than this and I was not at all satisfied being everyone's data errand boy.

F*ck that.

I set about fundamentally changing my view of data and how it interacts with the business.  

And one day, just like that, it all clicked. 

I was poolside in Crete reading Playing to Win by Alan Lafley. 

It's a strategy book, but to me, it's a data book. It helped me realise the actual purpose of data inside an organisation is to help it by first of all influencing it's strategy and then helping it to measure it's performance against it's strategy. 

And that everything else was down stream from that. Suddenly I realised that data is NOT a back office question answerer. 

It's a strategic enabler. 

The mindset shift was complete. 

My eyes had been opened and my faith in my chosen field restored. 

Data IS strategy.

- 

I’m actually diving deeply in to the topic of data strategy tomorrow in my n*wsletter. 

Make sure you’re on the list: https://lnkd.in/gdzmF_-v

Formerly a senior data leader within a US $1BN+ global E-commerce business.  I am highly analytical and have over 15 years experience in data, financial analysis and strategy roles. I hold a Masters degree in applied finance and have experience from startups, scale-ups and the high pressure world of banking where I worked for one of Wall Street's most well known banks: Bank of America Merrill Lynch.

I am deeply passionate about technology and startups and have been endorsed by Tech Nation as a Global Talent in Tech. I speak frequently at tech events and have experience as a founder having started two marketplace businesses.

I think dashboards are the most problematic thing in data. 

Think about it like this...

👉🏼  If you're a business and no one buys your product, you stop selling it and you research and pivot to a different product. 

Otherwise, you'd go out of business right? 

BUT... If you're a data analyst and no one looks at your dashboards, you just keep making them.

We can see that no one looks at them, but we blame the users for that!

What we fail to acknowledge is that dashboards are likely not the best way for us to interface with our partners. 

At least not in every situation we're building them for. 

If something isn't working - research and pivot!! 

Find another way!

I've seen A LOT of complaints lately about LinkedIn feeds lacking value. 

I've complained about it myself. We're seeing a lot from folks we don't follow talking about stuff we don't care about - and to top it off, their content is from 3 centuries ago 😭 (yeah that's still happening!)

That's why I've embraced my bell 🔔 🔔 🔔 🔔  

If I care about your content, I'm getting a bell about it!

Here are a few of the folks who's content I give a bell about - and if you like the same things as me, you should give them a bell as well 🔔 

Sebastian Hewing 🚀
Donabel Santos
Orell Garten
Bradley Coverdale
Heather Murray
Morgan Depenbusch, PhD
Brendan Ellis
Talha Khan
Gilbert Eijkelenboom
Arthur Feriotti
Rosanne Werner
Aurélien Vautier
Andrew Jones

Man, this certainly isn't all of them, and I don't ALWAYS interact with their stuff, but it's great cross section of brilliant minds in the data space that I love to read.

A good mix of strategic, business minded, technical and entrepreneurial. 

Follow these folks and turn on the bell 🔔 

Your feed will thank you for it. (I will also help you max your commenting game too!)

But I also wanna know - who's content do love enough to turn on that bell 🔔 ?

----------

Hi, I'm Tris🔥 and if you like my stuff, why not give me a bell too? 🔔

You know you can just say "no" right?

I love data folks but a lot of 'em are "yes" people. 

Being a great team member is not about doing everything we're asked. It's about doing the things that matter and drive impact, and saying "no" to the distractions. 

Or at the very least saying, "not now".

😖 Believe me: much of what you'll be asked to spend your time on during any given day won't drive impact and therefore doesn't matter. 

𝗧𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗴𝘀 𝘀𝘂𝗰𝗵 𝗮𝘀:
🔹 75% of dashboards 
🔹 Report design tweaks  
🔹 Ad hoc data requests/pulls
🔹 Work lacking strategic alignment

And so much more. 

By saying "yes" to things without a clear strategic justification, you're actually wasting company time and resources and generating an unholy amount of noise.

It's hard to do at the beginning, but once we've demonstrated your laser focus on delivering value for the business through data, they'll applaud you for it. 

We have agency, we have expertise, we have autonomy. 

We are not the companies sh*t kickers. 

Let's stop acting like it.

-------------------------
Hi I'm Tris 🔥 and I help data leaders and their teams to strategically say "no" more often, whilst building a stronger relationship with their stakeholders. If you're curious about how, why not grab a free 30min intro chat with me via my profile/website.

Most data teams fail.

Why? Because they're happy being told what to do... 

When they should (use data to) tell others what to do.

🩺 I like to think of a great data professional much like a doctor. 

A patient doesn't come to the doctor to tell him/her what prescriptions THEY need (can you imagine that world?)

Instead, a patient comes to the doctor to describe their symptoms and where they feel the pain and to seek remedies. 

It is then the doctor's job to investigate throughly and collect necessary data so that they can make recommendations and write prescriptions to improve the patient's health. 

🤷‍♂️ But most data teams don't act like this. 

They're usually more than happy for the patient to tell them what medicine they need (usually in the form of a dashboard 🤢). 

🤕 The problem with this is that while the stakeholder is the one feeling the pain most acutely, they are the least familiar with the data. Sure, they can have great ideas and the whole approach should be collaborative, but at the end of the day it is not their job to write their own prescriptions. 

That's the job of the data team. 

Does your data team behave like a doctor?

🚨 ATTN: Prices for my 1:1 data leadership coaching are going up on the first on January. Anyone one that signs on with me before that will lock in 2025 pricing and avoid the increase. 

If you'd like to work on becoming a more strategic, impactful and influential data leader why not book some time in with me for a free 1:1 chat. Head here to book now: https://lnkd.in/gwNChJVf

At a party on the weekend I was chatting with a commercial director at well-known multinational insurer. 

🤬 He was going off about the data team there.

"If I had the tools and skills, I'd just do all the analysis myself", he said of the quality of the work they produce.

He complained that they:

👉🏼 Frequently misunderstood the business challenges they were asked to help with.

👉🏼 Never dug into problems to better understand them.

👉🏼 Spent way too long on questions only to wind up answering the wrong ones. 

👉🏼 Produced severely over-complicated and technical answers to simple questions. 

👉🏼 Built dashboards when all he needed was a number in an email.

👉🏼 Never identified ways to improve commercial outcomes. Which is the main thing he wanted from them.

The list of complaints went on and on... 

So ask yourself, how might your business stakeholders talk about you when you're not in the room? 

🤔 Would they be saying the same things?

This is exactly what we're talking about when we say that data teams need to be closer to the business. 

We need to know their pain inside out. We need to make their pain ours.

We NEED to be business people ourselves. 

🛟 If you or your data team are struggling to make an impact with the business, then I'd love to work with you. My 1:1 data leadership coaching or data team group coaching is designed to help data functions make a bigger impact within the business and to contribute more strategically. 

Grab some time with me via my profile page or website.

If you’re looking to make a greater impact as a data leader…

There's a few things you might wanna 𝗦𝗧𝗢𝗣 doing, and a few more you might want to 𝗦𝗧𝗔𝗥𝗧 doing. 

Let's take a look 👇🏻

🚫 𝗦𝗧𝗢𝗣: Doing everything yourself. You're not longer an IC.

🟢 𝗦𝗧𝗔𝗥𝗧: Delegating more to your team. By entrusting them to take on greater challenges, you'll massively increase their confidence and capability. Allowing you to focus on more strategic pursuits. 
-

🚫 𝗦𝗧𝗢𝗣: Saying YES to every request made of your team.

🟢 𝗦𝗧𝗔𝗥𝗧: Rejecting work that doesn't clearly align to a strategic objective for the organisation. If you're unsure, challenge the requestor to make a strategic case for the work.
-

🚫 𝗦𝗧𝗢𝗣: Dashboard obsessions. Not everything needs to be one. 

🟢 𝗦𝗧𝗔𝗥𝗧: Start working proactively with your stakeholders and framing data communication with them in terms of Insight > Action > Business Impact. Sometimes it's a presentation, sometimes it's an email, sometimes its a dashboard.
-

🚫 𝗦𝗧𝗢𝗣: Measure success by outputs (tangible deliverables).

🟢 𝗦𝗧𝗔𝗥𝗧: Thinking in terms of strategic and value outcomes for the business. 
-

🚫 𝗦𝗧𝗢𝗣: Waiting to be invited to the conversation. 

🟢 𝗦𝗧𝗔𝗥𝗧: Inserting data leadership upstream. Attend strategic meetings. Become familiar with business strategy and align data efforts with it.
-

🚫 𝗦𝗧𝗢𝗣: Speaking in technical jargon!!

🟢 𝗦𝗧𝗔𝗥𝗧: Speak the language of the business. Understand what they care about and ensure your communication aligns with that. If they don't care about schema's or coding - don't talk to them about it.

I didn't go into a career in data so my greatest accomplishment would be to give "more important" people information so that they can go make all the big decisions. 

I got into data so that I could make the big decisions!! 
(in harmonious collaboration with others).

🚫 I never wanted to slide numbers under the board room door and back away quietly. 🙇‍♂️

🚫 I never wanted to build "reports" that people don't look at. (Soul crushing much?!) 💔

👉🏼 I wanted to be in the room spittin' facts and guiding the business on the right courses of action. 

👉🏼 I wanted to be the go-to-guy for questions like, "what do you think we should do next?" Or "why do you think this worked/didn't work?

👉🏼 I wanted to be informing strategies with data and giving folks the heads up when their KPIs start slippin'!

Maybe I'm the only one that thinks this way, but if you ask me the value of data is not in tools/technology or the best way to write a line of SQL... (however an important part of the equation)

It's in using your organisation's most valuable asset (data, obvs) to help it maximise value and accomplish it's strategic goals. 

That's why I got into data. 

The rest is noise.

---------

👋 Hi, I'm Tris 🔥 and my goal is to help data leaders become more strategic and influential within their organisations and held them become the version of themselves I've described above. 

If you like the sound of that, why not grab some time with me to chat through?  
Hit up my profile or website to book a free 1:1 chat with me now! My prices will go up in Jan, so do it now and lock in 2025 prices!

The tree is up, the heating is firmly in the ‘on’ position and, most importantly, our December book for the Bad Ass Bookshelf book club is confirmed!

This month, our book club members have voted overwhelmingly to read Carol S. Dweck's Mindset. 

Looks like these folks are keen to hit the ground running in 2025 with their mindset firmly adjusted so they are ready to roll.

I can't wait to dive into this book as well. 

It's not too late to join us on this one!!

If you're interested in being a part of the badest book club there ever was, just comment BADASS below and I'll shoot you over the secret codes to get started. 

How does it work in the Bad Ass Bookshelf? 

Well, each month members vote on which book they'd like to read from the nominations, then once that's decided we chat about the book via our dedicated Discord channel. At the end of the month we get together for a chat about the book over our end of month book club call. 

Sometimes the authors even join us!!

So again, if you'd like to join, comment BADASS below and I'll be in touch!

Well this is embarrassing… 🤦‍♂️ 

Is data democratisation actually a good thing? 

I wrote about this in my newsletter this week about how it can be, when handled wrong it can do more harm than good. 

What’s embarrassing is that very few of my readers actually answered my poll on the subject. 😬 

So I’m reposting it here to pump those numbers up. 

Have a go at if you will!

Oh, and if you wanna make sure you’re getting my weekly Data Leadership newsltter, you’ll find the link to it at the top of this post!

How far along is your organisation when it comes to data democratisation?

The author can see how you vote. Learn more

I've never had a problem saying no to stakeholders. 

Maybe it's my personality but I've often found it easy. 

Others I speak to in data - not so much. I think the default personality type in data is typically easy going folks who are eager to please. 

Which, don't get me wrong, is usually a good thing.

But the problem with that is that very often it gets in the way of us delivering impactful work. 

If we say yes to everything and treat everything as a priority, then it is impossible for us to filter out what's key and what's noise. 

The number one biggest challenge my data leadership coaching clients is face is overwhelm via data requests. They've set their team up as a data service desk and say YES to every single request that comes their way - valuable or not. 

They have no time left for strategic or discovery work.

Which fundamentally kills their ability to succeed. 

We need to be able to say no (or not now) to work that doesn't move the needle so that we can dedicate more time and brain power to core strategic initiatives. 

That's why I've put together the below decision support flow diagram to help leaders and teams evaluate the work that comes their way so they can make the right decision about whether or not to action it. 

I'd LOVE to get your feed back on this  - it's a work in progress so let me know how you feel about it or what you'd change! 👇🏻

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