Podcast appearances and mentions of daniel mintz

On April 2, renewed excavation began in Jerusalem's biblical royal quarter in preparation for reconstruction work to highlight the ancient city's famed past. The three-to- four-week excavation is the first return to the area, known as the Ophel, since the excavations led by the late Dr. Eilat Mazar in 2009–2010. This current excavation is led by Hebrew University's Prof. Yosef Garfinkel, staffed by the Armstrong Institute of Biblical Archaeology (AIBA) and funded by AIBA alongside Daniel Mintz and Meredith Berkman. On today's program, host Christopher Eames interviews aiba staff member Brent Nagtegaal who was on the 2009 excavation and is helping coordinate the excavation this year. https://armstronginstitute.org/1217-excavating-the-ophel-water-gate

Looking for a degree program that fits YOUR needs? UMGC might be just what you're looking for. Justin Hasty, director for UMGC's federal strategic partnerships, and Daniel Mintz (daniel.mintz@umgc.edu), Department Chair for information technology, joined me on the show to discuss how an online degree program can help build your skills in areas needed across the federal government. https://www.umgc.edu/learn-more/gen/degree/bachelors-degrees-online.html?marketcode=WB307001&gclsrc=aw.ds&gad=1&gclid=CjwKCAjw44mlBhAQEiwAqP3eVqp4Kj9QX0zlkipgg9wofvk07SwV_Z5BoqrIiHeJAEgEOmICPTbnRhoCgeIQAvD_BwE

Chief Data Evangelist at Looker, a part of Google Cloud, Daniel Mintz joins this episode to discuss the importance of data and what can be done with it via Looker and Google Cloud. Mintz also dives into how Looker’s capabilities impact customers, trends he’s seeing in multi-cloud, and culture change within people in order to embrace new technology.   Host: Miles WardGuest: Daniel Mintz   Connect on Twitter: https://twitter.com/cloudnclear https://twitter.com/SADA https://twitter.com/milesward https://twitter.com/danielmintz Connect on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/sada/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/milesward/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielmintz/   Register for Looker’s Digital Data Conference, JOIN@Home: https://looker.com/events/join-2020   To learn more, visit SADA.com.

Scott Belsky on Product Love, Beth Long on Maintainable, Mark Schell on Agile Uprising, Daniel Mintz on Product Love, and Kelsey Hightower on On Call Nightmares. I’d love for you to email me with any comments about the show or any suggestions for podcasts I might want to feature. Email podcast@thekguy.com. And, if you haven’t done it already, don’t forget to hit the subscribe button, and if you like the show, please tell a friend or co-worker who might be interested. This episode covers the five podcast episodes I found most interesting and wanted to share links to during the two week period starting December 23, 2019. These podcast episodes may have been released much earlier, but this was the fortnight when I started sharing links to them to my social network followers. SCOTT BELSKY ON PRODUCT LOVE The Product Love podcast featured Scott Belsky with host Eric Boduch. Scott founded Behance in 2005, which he calls a “LinkedIn for the creative world.” They were acquired by Adobe in 2012. He is now Chief Product Officer there. He wrote two books: Making Ideas Happen and The Messy Middle. Scott founded Behance because his designer and artist friends felt a sense of frustration at how their careers were at the mercy of circumstance. He pitched them on the idea of a social network for creatives and they hated it. So he asked what problem they wanted to solve. Many said that their portfolio sites were always out of date and hard for clients to find, they never got attribution for their work, their potential clients found it hard to look them up if they saw their work for another client, and there was a lack of software that catered to the business aspects of being a professional designer or artist. This was a community of customers who didn’t realize that what they needed is what they didn’t want. Behance needed to pull their customers through their first mile of doubt. When they put out a beta, they asked customers to put their portfolio on it and the customers said no because they had a portfolio site already. So they asked their customers if they could interview and write a blog post about them and they said yes. So Behance made a blog of leading designers and asked them for portfolio images. Customers agreed and let them put the images in Behance. They found a backdoor way to get some of the most beautiful portfolios into Behance upon launch. People who now looked up their favorite designers found them on Behance and thought, “I should be on there.” This taught Scott the lesson that, while the science of business is scaling, the art of business is the things that don’t scale. The best businesses find the non-scalable things to prime the pump for their products. Scott says businesses need to nail it before they scale it. In other words, they should aim for high product-market fit with a hundred or so users. Eric asked where the average product leader struggles in making the transition from being hands-on to more strategic. Scott says a common struggle is not empowering design sufficiently. You want to find the right design leaders and empower them sufficiently at the right point in the process. Great product leaders don’t say much at all. They are conduits that are working behind the scenes to get people aligned and to get designers and engineers working together. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/scott-belsky-joins-product-love-to-talk-about-exploring/id1343610309?i=1000458667222 Website link: https://www.spreaker.com/user/casted/belsky-edited-audio-mp3 BETH LONG ON MAINTAINABLE The Maintainable podcast featured Beth Long with host Robby Russell. Beth is a software engineer at New Relic. She says that maintainable code is code that prioritizes intelligibility and is oriented to the way humans interact with it. It is simple, clear, and emphasizes readability over conciseness. The infrastructure the code deploys to and the deployment mechanisms themselves should also prioritize intelligibility and clarity to be considered maintainable. Intelligible code is code that tends to make sense even to those that aren’t intimately familiar with it. This might be someone who hasn’t worked extensively in the codebase or someone who worked in it two months ago and has just now come back to it. Robby asked about technical debt. Working at New Relic, Beth has had opportunities to talk with Ward Cunningham, the originator of the term. When Ward coined the term, he was working on a financial system and he described technical debt, like financial debt, as something you deliberately take on. You sacrifice some maintainability in the short term and pay it back over time. Robby asked how developers can bring up maintainability concerns with stakeholders. Stakeholders are often focused on velocity, so they says things like, “Can we have the person who is on call due the sustainability engineering work?” This doesn’t work. What works is giving the team focused, protected time. Developers need to step out of their own experience of the world enough to understand the pain and pressure that their stakeholders live under and make a compelling case to them. Beth has seen it work. She has seen New Relic customers make slide decks to present to stakeholders about the value of doing the work to add observability to their systems and getting executive buy-in as a result. Robby asked about second system syndrome. She says it comes from the book The Mythical Man-Month and refers to the tendency to replace small, elegant systems that work well with bloated, over-engineered systems. You have a system that works well enough but people want more features and there is a temptation to replace the old system with something new. The old system is full of known flaws and, in the potential new system, the flaws are not yet known and you can pretend they are not there. This is why she recommends against rewrites. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/beth-long-maintainable-code-prioritizes-how-humans/id1459893010?i=1000458429284 Website link: https://maintainable.fm/episodes/beth-long-maintainable-code-prioritizes-how-humans-interact-with-it-XHdDZOQF MARK SCHELL ON AGILE UPRISING The Agile Uprising podcast featured Mark Schell with host Andy Cleff. Mark started out working at an organization that had reached CMMI (that is, Capability Maturity Model Integration) level 5 (that is, the highest level: optimizing) but he struggled to see the worth of it. Eventually, a friend of his introduced him to Extreme Programming or XP and this got him energized about Agile. They got into a discussion about a talk Mark attended at the Philly XP conference that was given by Ryan Lockard. Ryan described the benefits of cleaning up old code. Mark says that the less you clean up after yourself, the more stuff you have to step around. This also means being careful not to add too much complexity, as this makes things more complicated for the user and for the developers. Andy asked Mark where he starts in such a situation where you inherit a system where there hasn’t been a great deal of taking out the trash. Mark referenced Foot and Yoder’s paper on the big ball of mud. He says you start with the smallest pieces you can find. Don’t be afraid to delete things; that’s what we have code repositories for. If you are using a compiled language and you have tools like Resharper, make use of them. Mark talked about tools like OpenGrok for making code files more searchable.  He says there are going to be cases where you have to take a leap of faith; you have to delete something that you know you may need to revert if you discover a previously unknown use. If you never take that risk and you’re always afraid of that code, you’ll never get to a cleaner state. Andy asked about how things get this way. Mark says that most developers’ passion is often around the building of new things. Combined with schedule pressure, doing chores like code cleanup becomes a low priority. Mark says that, ideally, it should be baked into the red-green-refactor cycle. Andy asks how we can push back as craftspeople when the business says, “More, more, more.” Mark says you need to find a way to tie this retirement of complexity to revenue. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/clean-code-refactoring-and-deleting-w-mark-schell/id1163230424?i=1000459008564 Website link: http://agileuprising.libsyn.com/clean-code-refactoring-and-deleting-w-mark-schell DANIEL MINTZ ON PRODUCT LOVE The Product Love podcast featured Daniel Mintz with host Eric Boduch. The work Daniel did in politics informed everything he does everyday. It helped him understand how people interact with products, how to scale and grow, how data can inform product decisions, how data can mislead product decisions, and how tools get built. When you’re running a giant volunteer political organization, that’s the lowest-attachment user you can imagine. Your product has to be good at grabbing users and getting them in the door or else it’s not going to work. Daniel says we often fall into the trap of being data-driven. He thinks of the episode of The Office where Michael Scott drives into the lake because the GPS tells him to turn right. There is a difference between being data-driven and data-informed and when data conflicts with your intuition, your qualitative research, and your experience, you should interrogate that. Eric asked how Daniel ended up at Looker. Daniel described his first experience with their sales team. After the salesperson struggled to describe what Looker was, he eventually asked Daniel to let him show off Looker by connecting to Daniel’s database and letting Daniel ask Looker any question about his own data. In ten minutes, the salesperson had shown him things about his data he had never seen before. Seeing Looker in this way, Daniel felt like he did when first encountered the power of SQL, but this time it was something that anybody could use. Just as any good product manager would try to get to the real problem when a customer comes to them with a solution like, “I want to make this button blue,” when a customer asks a data analyst to show them sales by salesperson by region for the last six months, a good analyst will ask them why. They might say, “I want to see if there is a big difference in how salespeople ramp over different regions.” The analyst might then respond, “What if we narrow that down and only look at people recently hired?” Product managers need to do the same thing when thinking about how they use data. For example, if you are trying to understand where people get stuck in the on-boarding path, then usage data may be useful. If you are trying to understand whether people’s impression of the product has changed over time, net promoter score might be what you need. Start with the question instead of saying, “This is the data I have available and here is what I can make of it.” Daniel says that good operational metrics are ones that, upon looking at them, you immediately know what you should do in response to them. Alternatively, dashboards of vanity metrics can be disempowering for people: if you are a product manager who isn’t working on a revenue-creating part of the product yet, a dashboard tracking a vanity metric like revenue is not something you can do anything about. Daniel gave an example of vanity and operational metrics for a company like Uber or Lyft. A vanity metric might be rides taken or cities served. It is the kind of metric that might be valuable to investors, not for the people that work there. An operational metric might be percentage of rides cancelled and that is only operational if you dig a level deeper to find out why they were cancelled. Eric asked Daniel for his take on net promoter score. From the consumer perspective, Daniel says, NPS is a great innovation because it is so simple and easy to administer that your response rate is going to be higher than any other survey question. Being a single question survey makes it easy to ask in-product rather than in a survey email and thereby increase response rate even further. He says that tracking NPS over time makes it even more useful. When it is used to just ask if something is good or bad, however, it just becomes another vanity metric. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/daniel-mintz-joins-product-love-to-talk-about-data/id1343610309?i=1000459282754 Website link: https://www.spreaker.com/user/casted/daniel-mintz-joins-product-love-to-talk- KELSEY HIGHTOWER ON ON CALL NIGHTMARES The On Call Nightmares podcast featured Kelsey Hightower with host Jay Gordon. Kelsey talked about what he calls “learning in public”, in which you share things as you learn them. He says that when you learn in public, you tend to not skip over the interesting bits from zero to getting started. A lot of times, we’re afraid to share that because we want to be seen as experts. Kelsey talked about his truest introduction to on call. He described how his CTO made it clear just how important their work was to customers. Hearing about the consequences for customers of system downtime put things in perspective for Kelsey. Kelsey says that if you fail to explain it, on call can feel like you’re overtaxing your employees. It is less like on call and more like glorified overtime. Another lesson Kelsey learned about on call at that company happened when he took on all of the on call work for two months. His goal was to find the patterns and make it go away. Over the two months, he made sure the issues were documented and the documentation was made consistent. The rest of the team saw Kelsey as “taking one for the team”. The team was able to do work in their areas of expertise to improve the on call experience. The number of incidents dropped from 1-2 per week every week to having weeks without any incidents. They had been in a cycle in which on call pain was spread out enough that nobody did anything about it. Stepping up and showing leadership by doing changed things. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/episode-45-kelsey-hightower-google/id1447430839?i=1000460193573 Website link: https://www.podomatic.com/podcasts/oncallnightmares/episodes/2019-12-19T08_16_15-08_00 LINKS Ask questions, make comments, and let your voice be heard by emailing podcast@thekguy.com. Twitter: https://twitter.com/thekguy LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keithmmcdonald/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thekguypage Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_k_guy/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheKGuy Website:

This week on Product Love, I sat down with Daniel Mintz, the chief data evangelist at Looker, a data exploration and discovery business intelligence platform. Daniel studied music and politics as an undergrad and later pursued his Master’s in multimedia engineering. He’s worked as the head of data and analytics at Upworthy and as a director of analytics at MoveOn.org.  His love for data started with learning SQL. But if you’re curious about how he got the chief data evangelist role at Looker, listen to the episode above. We talked about data lakes, metrics that matter, and why “why?” is so important for PMs. 

Businesses today are finding it increasingly valuable to share data beyond their own enterprise data warehouse — both inside and outside their organizations. Some are using data to surface key insights between departments or between companies, while others are using it to help monetize their data. While historically data sharing has involved the copying and/or movement of large data sets, data warehouse vendors like Snowflake have made it easier than ever to share data between organizations or groups of organizations.   While the ability to share data with ease has increased, mechanisms for sharing the accompanying business logic and modes of analysis alongside the data itself are still lacking. This business logic is extremely valuable because it contains a consistent interpretation of the data, designed by data experts, that simplifies analyzes and unifies metrics between data consumers. Daniel Mintz, Chief Data Evangelist at Looker, joins me to talk about how data sharing is transforming businesses and helping to provide a competitive edge. We also talk about their recent announcement that Looker is joining the Google Family Throughout his career, Daniel Mintz has focused on how people interact with data and how they can use it to get better at what they do. He's passionate about the way analytics can help tackle the world's toughest challenges. Previously, he was Head of Data & Analytics at fast-growing media startup Upworthy. Before that, he was Director of Analytics at political powerhouse MoveOn.org. Daniel has appeared in numerous media venues, from NPR's All Things Considered to MSNBC's The Last Word to The New York Times and The Washington Post. He is a regular speaker at conferences including Google NEXT, AWS re Invent, eMetrics, the Big Data Innovation Summit.    

Daniel Mintz,  Chief Data Evangelist at Looker, steps us through some common misconceptions about who uses data for business, how they are using it, and what the future of business intelligence looks like.     Today's businesses face unprecedented challenges when it comes to the size and complexity of their data sets. New technologies allow more widespread and sophisticated access to data assets than ever before.  With such capabilities at our fingertips, it is easy to assume that the future of business intelligence will be a bigger, more complex version of what has come before. But will it?   About Our Guest Daniel Mintz is the Chief Data Evangelist at Looker. Previously, he was Head of Data & Analytics at fast-growing media startup Upworthy and before that, he was Director of Analytics at political powerhouse MoveOn.org. Throughout his career, Daniel has focused on how people interact with data in their everyday lives and how they can use it to get better at what they do. Music: www.bensound.com Videos and Images from Pixabay.com and other sources. Image by Gerd Altmann  FF 012-817

Business intelligence is a necessity for any organization that wants to be able to make informed decisions based on the data that they collect. Unfortunately, it is common for different portions of the business to build their reports with different assumptions, leading to conflicting views and poor choices. Looker is a modern tool for building and sharing reports that makes it easy to get everyone on the same page. In this episode Daniel Mintz explains how the product is architected, the features that make it easy for any business user to access and explore their reports, and how you can use it for your organization today.

Join Kevin and Stewart as they dive deep into delivering analytics for cloud-native platforms. They are joined by Michael Nixon, Sr. Director, Product Marketing at Snowflake, George Fraser, Founder & CEO of FiveTran, and Daniel Mintz , Chief Data Evangelist from Looker. Each of these technologies and Red Pill's approach to deploying analytics faster, cheaper and better will be highlighted in more detail at the Jump Program, a free event January 11 in Minneapolis.

Mark Rittman is joined by Daniel Mintz from Looker to talk about BI and analytics on Google BigQuery, data modelling on the new generation of cloud-based distributed-data warehousing platforms, and Looker's re-introduction of semantic models to big data analytics developers

Mark Rittman is joined by Daniel Mintz from Looker to talk about BI and analytics on Google BigQuery, data modelling on the new generation of cloud-based distributed-data warehousing platforms, and Looker's re-introduction of semantic models to big data analytics developers