In Episode 49 of Driven by Data: The Podcast, Kyle Winterbottom is joined by Karen Jean-Francois, Analytics Manager at Cardlytics, where they discuss how people can craft the career they want in Data & Analytics, her humbling career journey so far and how she overcame imposter syndrome, which includes;

• Moving from the Caribbean to Paris to London
• Her struggles of living away from home & her family
• The transition from performing at the European Championships into the world of Data
• Why she hosts the Women In Data Podcast
• How she was awarded the 20 in Data & Technology 2020
• Why she struggled to find her place & voice
• The importance of role models and networking on her career
• How she joined Cardlytics as the only female in the team
• Why she had a huge case of Imposter Syndrome and how she overcame it
• How she realised it was all in her own mind
• Why it prevented her from being promoted despite knowing she was doing great work
• The importance of opening up about Imposter Syndrome
• Why company culture is so important to deal with Imposter Syndrome
• How to go from diagnosis to action (to start addressing the problem)
• The journey from introvert with imposter syndrome to winning industry awards and podcast host
• The technical V commercial debate
• How she almost quit Data & Analytics to become a pastry chef
• That she realized that she had so far let others decide what my career would look like
• The importance of owning your own career and defining what you want it to be
• Her top questions for crafting your career:

1. Where are you at today?
2. Where would you like to be and why?
3. What's stopping you from getting there?
4. How are you going to overcome these blockers?

In Episode 22 of Season 3, of Driven By Data: The Podcast, Kyle Winterbottom is joined by Vin Vashista, Founder of V Squared and a LinkedIn "Top Voice", where they discuss how to deliver tangible ROI from your data and analytics initiatives, which includes;

• How Vin reached 160K Followers on LinkedIn and became a “Top Voice” by writing about data monetization
• Why he wanted to write a book that was a single blueprint in a book; “From Data to Profit”
• Why 70% of data teams are NOT delivering any returns for their organisation
• Why genuine ROI will keep the hype and boom going
• Why you need to hire differently to monetize data
• How to identify the first green shoots of value creation
• The biggest problem is that we don’t connect the technology to the strategy
• Why it’s imperative to get C-Suite sponsorship if you want to be successful
• Why you have to delvier ROI incrementally and not wait for a big bang
• If you let technology drive strategy you end up with more technology
• Why you need a prioritization framework
• Why the frustrations of data and C-Suite professionals is the same root cause
• Why you need an opportunity discovery framework that involves the whole business
• Why business teams know where the opportunities are but they have no way of articulating their needs
• Why data teams aren’t the best people to decide what the business should be doing
• How we confuse strategy and tactics
• Why we need to interrogate our data & analytics ideas like a shark tank pitch
• Why most C-Suite Leaders think the data team needs to be managed as it can’t be accountable for its own value creation
• Why you need a Data Monetization catalogue
• The 3 slide sales deck that Execs keep falling for
• The 9-figure ROI use cases
• Why there are so few people who can connect hype to revenue
• Why C-Suite executives are transfixed on ROI yet still invest in data projects that don’t deliver any ROI
• Why many Data Leaders are great strategic leaders yet most don’t actually lead the strategy
• Why to be a successful CDO you need to have come from a Data role/background, but shouldn’t be hands-on
• Why we should train our technical people to be more than just more technical
• Why moving forward people who can’t prove ROI won’t have a place in the organisation
• Why data teams will be the growth engine for most businesses over the next 5 years
• The misunderstanding that you can clean your way to valuable data
• Why you need a product-first approach to data
• Buy-in = TRUST
• Why 'track record of success' is the only way to C-Suite sponsorship