Having good management support is very nice, especially early on while I Was learning how to have the right conversations, and how to choose priorities, and learning what questions to ask.

But you can get a lot of these things by building relationships with every department of the company. Learn their jobs, learn their data needs (almost everyone has needs to data insights), and you’ll learn about the business and draw connections.

In my career, I’ve helped lawyers collect data for their arguments, finance for projecting revenue and financial reports, inventory teams for stock management, engineering for product work, customer support for worker scheduling and analytics for tickets and fraud, marketing for prospecting and targeting…

If you help them all succeed, you’ll succeed.