You have solved the nuts-and-bolts issues. You have read all the preceding chapters and could recite those by heart. Now you are moving beyond wanting to be "productive day to day"; you are ready to help shape your future and Agilytic's. Your professional development and Agilytic's growth are both now under your control. Here are some thoughts on steering toward success.
Roles
By now, it is evident that roles at Agilytic are fluid. Since we often interact with others outside the company, having "titles" makes it easier to get their jobs done.
Inside the company, though, we all take on the role that suits the work in front of us. Everyone is a business developer. Everyone can question each other's work. Anyone can recruit someone. Everyone must function as a "strategist," which means figuring out how to do what's right for our customers. We all engage in analysis, measurement, predictions, evaluations.
One outward expression of these ideals is the thematic ownership we aspire to dispatch regardless of seniority. It is up to everyone to build their corpus of knowledge and initiatives surrounding a sector.
Advancement vs. growth
Because Agilytic doesn't have a traditional hierarchical structure, it can be confusing to figure out how Agilytic fits into your career plans. "Before Agilytic, I was a junior analyst in a big four. I had planned to be a data science team lead in five years. How am I supposed to keep moving forward here?" Working at Agilytic provides an opportunity for extremely efficient and, in many cases, accelerated career growth. It offers the chance to broaden one's skill set well outside of the narrow constraints that careers can have at most other companies.
So, the "growth ladder" is tailored to you. It operates as fast as you can manage to grow. You oversee your track, and you can elicit help with it anytime from those around you. We believe that high-performance people are generally self-improving.
Our goal is for most people who fit well at Agilytic. That they will position themselves on a more promising trajectory after their time spent here than they could have been if they'd spent their time pretty much anywhere else.
Care about Agilytic = care about you
It is pretty much a riff on our first value: Treat Agilytic like it is all yours.
In other words, the fastest way to senior management is to prove that we can trust you to be the most dedicated steward of the Agilytic vision, values and always act in the interests of the organization's long-term goals.
It is simple, but not easy. The good news is that when your ambitions and common interests align, you will find the sincerest support from your peers and the management team.
Never stop learning
We'd rather have to calm you down than to wake you up. Never hesitate to come up with training suggestions for yourself or the team.
Likewise, share what you have learned. The best way to learn is to teach.
Put more tools in your toolbox
The most successful people at Agilytic are both (1) highly skilled at a broad set of things and (2) established experts within a narrower discipline. Because of the talent diversity here at Agilytic, it is often beneficial — and highly recommended — to become stronger at things that aren't your core skill set (or, as Julien would say, to work on the muscles you are not used to training).
Engineers: code is only the beginning
If you come from a quantitative background, you are now surrounded by a multidisciplinary group of experts in all kinds of sectors (telecom, banking, media) and disciplines (data visualization, storytelling, marketing, sales, management). Many of these people are often sitting in the same room as you (or one Teams call away), so learning opportunities are enormous. Take advantage of this fact whenever possible: the more you can learn about the mechanics, vocabulary, and analysis within other disciplines, the more valuable you become.
Non-Engineers: program or be programmed
Agilytic's core competency is making the most of data. Different disciplines are part of delivering our services, but we are still a data-centric company. That is because the core of the project management process is data modeling. If your expertise is not in data manipulation, then every bit of energy you put into understanding our projects' data management part is to your (and Agilytic's) benefit.
You don't need to become an expert in the latest cutting-edge tech, and there is nothing that says an expert is more valuable than you. But broadening your awareness in a highly technical direction is never a bad thing. It'll either increase the quality or quantity of bits you can put "into boxes," which means affecting customers more, which means you are valuable.
