Metadata
- Author: Ilan Man
- Full Title:: The Many Hats of a Data Analyst
- Category:: 🗞️Articles
- URL:: https://locallyoptimistic.com/post/data-analyst/
- Finished date:: 2023-07-29
Highlights
This could also be a good distinction between Business Analysis and Data Analysis: it does not entirely disconnect Data Analysts from the domains. Business Analysts are short-term vs. data analysts being long term Data Team Roles.
While data analyst responsibilities often overlap with those of a business analyst, a good data analyst also builds models, performs experiments, works cross functionally and occasionally spikes on more technical projects – all tasks that require time. Business analysts, however, operate on their business team’s schedule, requiring quick turn around and answers to very specific questions. A business analyst might answer the question, “Why did sales drop last week?”, whereas a data analyst works on a question like, “What is the single biggest driver within our control to increase sales?” The latter type of question could require weeks of work; the former perhaps a few hours. (View Highlight)
Data transformations – transformations that take in application or third party data and transform it according to business logic – used to be the domain of the Data engineer, and in larger organizations it still is, though tech companies are more likely to hire an Analytics Engineer to do this work. But until the Data team gets large enough to specialize, data analysts perform these tasks (View Highlight)