S4 | Ep 38 | Data Accessibility; From Technical Solution to Business Value with Rui Machado, Vice President Data Engineering and Architecture at H&M Group

In Episode 38, of Season 4, of Driven by Data: The Podcast, Kyle Winterbottom is joined by Rui Machado, Vice President of Data Engineering and Architecture at H&M Group, where they discuss data modelling, accessibility and translating highly technical solutions into business value, which includes;

• Working for household names such as Nike and Meta
• Leading a team of 200 Data Engineers at H&M
• Becoming the author of; Analytics Engineering with SQL and Dbt: Building Meaningful Data Models at Scale
• H&M’s focus on sustainability and society
• Why data modelling lost relevance and why it’s had a resurgence
• The fundamental changes in how organisations build and use data models
• Why decentralising ownership of data has disrupted the industry
• Why SQL is still the core tool for data teams and why it has survived despite the explosion of the modern data stack
• Why there has been a refocusing on data accessibility      
• What sets the great engineers apart from the good engineers
• Why data engineering teams need to be more aligned to their business stakeholders  
• Why engineers need to understand the economics of building specific applications  
• How organisations can ensure that their technical teams are delivering things that will help the business to create/realise value
• Why some technical people can elevate themselves into leadership and others struggle
• How to connect very technical concepts to business outcomes and strategies
• Using OKRs to understand business priorities and align your engineering goals
• The shift from data teams being a service team to being a partner

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