100 - Why Your Data, AI, Product & Business Strategies Must Work Together (and Digital Transformation is The Wrong Framing) with Vin Vashishta

Today I’m chatting with Vin Vashishta, Founder of V Squared. Vin believes that with methodical strategic planning, companies can prepare for continuous transformation by removing the silos that exist between leadership, data, AI, and product teams. How can these barriers be overcome, and what is the impact of doing so? Vin answers those questions and more, explaining why process disruption is necessary for long-term success and gives real-world examples of companies who are adopting these strategies.   Highlights/ Skip to: What the AI ‘Last Mile’ Problem is (03:09) Why Vin sees so many businesses are reevaluating their offerings and realigning with their core business model (09:01) Why every company today is struggling to figure out how to bridge the gap between data, product, and business value (14:25) How the skillsets needed for success are evolving for data, product, and business leaders (14:40) Vin’s process when he’s helping a team with a data strategy, and what the end result looks like (21:53) Why digital transformation is dead, and how to reframe what business transformation means in today’s day and age (25:03) How Airbnb used data to inform their overall strategy to survive during a time of massive industry disruption, and how those strategies can be used by others as a preventative measure (29:03) Unpacking how a data strategy leader can work backward from a high-level business strategy to determining actionable steps and use cases for ML and analytics (32:52) Who (what roles) are ultimately responsible in an ideal strategy planning session? (34:41) How the C-Suite can bridge business & data strategy and the impact the world’s largest companies are seeing as a result (36:01) Quotes from Today’s Episode “And when you have that [core business & technology strategy] disconnect, technology goes in one direction, what the business needs and what customers need sort of lives outside of the silo.” – Vin Vashishta (06:06) “Why are we doing data and not just traditional software development? Why are we doing data science and not analytics? There has to be a justification because each one of these is more expensive than the last, each one is, you know, less certain.” – Vin Vashishta (10:36) “[The right people to train] are smart about the technology, but have also lived with the users, have some domain expertise, and the interest in making a bigger impact. Let’s put them in strategy roles.” – Vin Vashishta (18:58) “You know, this is never going to end. Transformation is continuous. I don’t call it digital transformation anymore because that’s making you think that this thing is somehow a once-in-a-generation change. It’s not. It’s once every five years now.” – Vin Vashishta (25:03) “When do you want to have those [business] opportunities done by? When do you want to have those objectives completed by? Well, then that tells you how fast you have to transform if you want to use each one of these different technologies.” – Vin Vashishta (25:37) “You’ve got to disrupt the process. Strategy planning is not the same anymore. Look at how Amazon does it. ... They are destroying their competitors because their strategy planning process is both expert and data model-driven.” – Vin Vashishta (33:44) “And one of the critical things for CDOs to do is tell stories with data to the board. When they sit in and talk to the board. They need to tell those stories about how one data point hit this one use case and the company made $4 million.” – Vin Vashishta (39:33) Links HumblePod: https://humblepod.com V Squared: https://datascience.vin LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vineetvashishta/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/v_vashishta YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheHighROIDataScientist Substack: https://vinvashishta.substack.com/