One thing nobody tells you about data work is that 80% of it happens before you open your laptop.

I spent the first two years of my career optimizing the wrong 20%. Beautiful pipelines, spotless schemas,dashboards I was genuinely proud of. Delivered to people who had no idea what question they were trying to answer.

The hard way is: watching something you built get ignored. Repeatedly, until you finally ask why.

The answer is always the same - you skipped the conversation. Now I see it happening for our clients too - a problem old as the world.