Executive Briefing: Upskilling your business teams to scale analytics in your organization

Before joining Alphabet’s venture capital arm GV, Barkha Gvalani worked at Google on a business intelligence team supporting the finance department. The BI engineers were responsible for architecting the right data solutions but also for extracting and visualizing data for the finance business users’ ad hoc needs. As Google’s business continued to grow, the team was faced with a challenge: How do you architect the right data solutions that scale?

Barkha went back to the drawing board and created a basic hands-on training for an end-to-end data pipeline including visualization to test with a small subset of users. Even before the training was launched, word spread, and the number of users the training was intended for had quadrupled. The same playbook has been very effective for startups that GV invests in as well.

Barkha shares a framework for developing and delivering analytics training to nontechnical users and offers a few lessons from creating and running this playbook.

Topics include:

• When is it the right time to invest in upskilling business users?
• What is the right form of training?
• How do you enable continuous learning?