The Top 5 Finding Data Operations Posts of 2024
Here are the posts you liked best this year, from Pivot Tables to SFDC Reports to Products that Should Exist. Happy New Year! Read: "Everything Starts Out Looking Like a Toy" #231
Hi, I’m Greg 👋! I write weekly product essays, including system “handshakes”, the expectations for workflow, and the jobs to be done for data. What is Data Operations? was the first post in the series.
This week’s toy: a package to render web pages in your Terminal app. This seems like having “picture-in-picture” for your VSCode, but in all seriousness will help us to get closer to a single pane of glass where editing, browsing, and interacting move together. Edition 231 of this newsletter is here - it’s December 30, 2024.
If you have a comment or are interested in sponsoring, hit reply.
The Big Idea
A short long-form essay about data things
⚙️ The Top 5 Finding Data Operations Posts of 2024
Hello and thanks for reading! This is a moment to pause and reflect on the most popular posts of 2024.
Through 52 posts, we explored Chatbots, AI Agents, Salesforce formulas, techniques to improve your Go To Market mechanism, and more.
The most popular posts here cover tactical tasks like using Excel or Salesforce to break down data for a quick answer. They also cross into bigger strategic questions like how to communicate business changes through data-driven stories.
What’s the takeaway from the group of articles? Operators need to have tactical and strategic skills to excel at GTM. Whether you are building in code, creating in low-code/no-code, or documenting a key standard operating procedure, isolating the building blocks so that you can automate them is a key skill that we will all be doing more of in 2025.
Here are the top articles for 2024:
#5 - Standardizing Logging and Discovery
Understanding what happened is a key capability for operations teams. Many times a week we need to diagnose problems quickly and suggest solutions. As we add more pieces to the ops stack, it’s more important than ever to ensure that each new addition broadcasts successes and failures to the larger system.
Here’s a blueprint for building that idea.
#4 - Making those Salesforce Reports Better
As a Salesforce admin, you will definitely get questions on ways to improve reports. One of the key tools at your disposal? The row-level formula, which applies logic to every row of your dataset to make logical decisions or populate a special column you can use to drive reports.
Here are a few ways to get started with row-level formulas in SFDC.
3 row-level formulas to level up your Salesforce reports
#3 - Building Beautiful Visualizations With Data
How many times have you created amazing Slides for a presentation, and just before the meeting, been asked: “can you update that with the most up-to-date data?” Too often, the work to build beautiful data-driven visuals isn’t automatic.
It would be great if that product (and that strategy of building visualizations to be continuously updating) were available.
#2 - Creating Vertical Software is a Competitive Advantage
It’s tempting to think that one size fits call when you’re building software. But building for the specific needs of a vertical works even better.
Here’s a take on owning that strategy:
#1 - Pivot Tables Are Still Useful
Of all the technologies still likely to be around in 30 years, I’d bet on SQL and Microsoft Excel to be near the top of that list. One of the key reasons is the concept of the Pivot Table, a way to show grouped data in a tabular format in a spreadsheet.
Here are a few great ways to use the Pivot Table.
There you have it - see you in 2025!
What’s the takeaway? Thank you for subscribing and reading in 2024. It’s been a wonderful year of conversations and ideas. Let me know if there’s a topic you’d like to see more of in 2025 - I’m listening!
Links for Reading and Sharing
These are links that caught my 👀
1/ Airports always need more space - JFK airport in NYC occupies the same basic footprint as it did in 1946. Why is it so hard to build or expand airports?
2/ Build once, then discard - A very smart developer I once worked with advocated this method of creating code: build your first draft as fast as you can, then get rid of it. Does this work better than a design doc? It’s always up to date, but fails to communicate what you are working on to someone outside of the team. Perhaps instead consider auto-documenting code?
3/ Learning new things about old songs - there’s a moment in Pink Floyd’s album The Wall when you hear a moment of telecom audio on an open telephone line. If you’re old enough to remember what dial tones sound like, this analysis might teach you something new about classic dial tone.
What to do next
Hit reply if you’ve got links to share, data stories, or want to say hello.
The next big thing always starts out being dismissed as a “toy.” - Chris Dixon