June Dershewitz, Head of Data Strategy at Amazon Music, is a consummate, analytics professional. Like many, she came to analytics out of a desire to understand the world around her though numbers and she has parlayed her computer science and math skills into a senior management position. What made the difference? Her innate comprehension of the human condition. This interview is a masterclass in managing large-scale analytics at one of the most data-focused companies in the world.
June shares how making origami led to her first analytics job, which led to daily, private tutoring by Gary Angel, and her substantial role at Amazon Music.
She describes her interactions with data scientists, data analysts, and data engineers, in order to ensure clarity about what they are delivering, when they are delivering it, whether or not that are resourced to be able to deliver the right thing, and then making sure that the deliverables are as actionable as possible by the business stakeholders at the receiving end.
Delve into June’s ideas about balancing data quality with business impact, strategic versus operational analytics, and prioritizing ad-hoc analytics questions. She offers prudent insights about Data Democratization, Amazon Music’s approach to creating an analytics knowledgebase, and her personal opinion about dashboards.
And yes, she reveals the secret to being able to influence without authority.