No one will take ownership of your career when you're a data engineer or analyst and if you're not careful you'll quickly become the go-to-person for ad-hoc data pulls.

Just a service desk for the marketing, HR, sales or other department. Don't get me wrong, it feels great to feel needed. I remember being the person that could quickly write any query needed for a data set for another team.

But completing 1000 Jira tasks doesn't mean you were impactful.

It can be easy to get caught up in the motion of work without ever asking if the work is worth doing. As the saying goes, don't mistake motion for progress, especially if your goal is to grow.

In this article I want to discuss why it's important to find projects that move the needle and how to do so.