Todd Foley: Hello and welcome to the CDO Magazine interview series. I’mTodd Foley, Chief Digital Officer and CISO with Lydonia, an AI solutions company. Today, I have the pleasure of speaking withShruti Sharma, Data Delivery Team Leader for Analytics, Insights, and Automation at Philips. Shruti, hello.
Shruti Sharma: Hi, Todd. I’m happy to be part of this conversation and to be associated with others who’ve been contributing to CDO Magazine here in Nashville and in other places. I’m very excited to be part of this conversation and humbled at the same time.
Todd Foley: Shruti, I’d love to start by hearing a bit more about you and your role at Philips.
Shruti Sharma: We support, primarily, commercial operations and a lot of reporting analytics that sits or stands on the shoulders of giants, as I tell my team. So, when we do our job right, the business is able to make more meaningful decisions. They can rest more securely on those facts. We are the hidden or the underlying layer that lifts, when it comes to applications or reporting and analytics specifically for North America commercial sales.
Todd Foley: Got it. That’s a lot of hats, right? And just from your title – Data Delivery, Analytics, Insights, Automation – that’s a lot of different areas, of not just technology, but also dealing with the business in different ways.
Shruti Sharma: Right. And Todd, I mean, you and I both know data is a team sport. You don’t do it by yourself. So, I’m not doing things all by myself. I already have a tool delivery partner, and we’ve got product teams that support us. There are a lot of players in this whole landscape as we are building data products.
Todd Foley: So, would you say it takes a village to build data products?
Shruti Sharma: It takes a village to build data products. You couldn’t have said it better. It takes a village to keep analytics thriving. Nothing exists in isolation – not the data, not the code, not the people, none of it.
Todd Foley: I think it takes a lot of us some time to realize how important those things are. Maybe you could give us some background on just your journey as a data professional – what got you into this space originally, and how has your perspective on what you have to do in your role and what’s critical changed over time?
Shruti Sharma: I feel like I have a nontraditional entry intotechnology and data. I have a PhD in cellular biochemistry. I’ve always been motivated by the possibility of creating meaningful impact and pushing the boundaries of what’s known. And initially, I did that using research, studying protein folding, membrane transfer, and a lot of basic life science work for a decade. And as I was working through those things in the best-case scenario, it would take at least a few decades for that work to impact, like make a tangible impact in someone’s life. And I wanted something that had more of an immediate gratification. I still deeply have a huge respect for that work; I just realized that I needed something to keep me engaged, something that had a faster turnaround time. I came across analytics as how empowering it could be. Being exposed to some exceptional presentations by Ron’s hassling and the way his work used some visualizations and how we contextualized economic data, which is often considered so dry for stakeholders and decision-makers, in a way that completely changed how the world looked at poverty, intervention, and health. So that was very fascinating for me. And for me, it was a turning point almost and that’s something that I still keep going back to when it comes to data and Phillips with time. I’ve been what I consider myself, like this whole continuum of data and products. I started as an application developer, done a bit of data modeling, upskilled with data science, and I’ve been part of teams led efforts throughout this whole continuum, right? So, I feel like I’m, in some ways, Jack of all trades, or Jill if you make that, and then approaching things with like open curiosity and solving problems. I wholeheartedly embrace the rookie label and the rookie mindset. So having that kind of curiosity and intellectual humility to approach whatever is in front of us. So that’s been my journey so far.
Todd Foley: I think you’re right. I think that’s a very nontraditional path in a number of ways, right? To go from molecular biology and being a research scientist to being in data and analytics, and doing so because of the immediate gratification aspect, which traditionally hasn’t been a huge part of data and analytics – though nowadays, it is all about real-time data and immediate insight. But that’s a journey for sure, and you have a breadth of background in the data space. How has that intellectual curiosity, that sort of taking the same types of pursuit that you’d had as a scientist and then applying it as a data scientist, and then engaging with the business to give them their own immediate gratification and insight from analytics. That’s quite a journey. How do you engage with the business to meet them that way, to share that mindset, and to get them not only to work with you and to appreciate the efforts of your teams, but also there’s trust and persuasion involved in that, right? Both with the business and with your own data teams. Can you tell me a little bit about how you do that?
Shruti Sharma: I think building trust is extremely important within your team, your partners, and your stakeholders at all levels. It’s one of the things that’s easily broken, and it takes forever to build. So, some things that I think have helped me or helped my teams in my experiences to be more open, create visibility for your processes, for your decisions, and for your part when it comes to roadmaps and all of that. When people know more, they’re more aware of the context within which you’re operating or within which you’re making decisions. They see where you’re coming from. Be open and engage others in where they’re going and find synergy wherever possible in our respective journeys. So, when we make a mistake – and that happens, whether it is a human mistake, whether it is some kind of an integration oversight, whether it is some change in a business process that didn’t get communicated effectively or efficiently – be the first to raise your hand and let people know proactively. Something blipped; we are aware of it, and we are working to fix it, and we’ll keep you in the loop as we work through it. A lot of times, my partners or business counterparts have come back and told me how important it was for them that we were forthcoming with whatever happened. And that’s an opportunity to build trust because most people have a difficult relationship with things happening behind the scenes. They would rather know, and these things happen. Mistakes get made. If you’re not making any mistakes, the surest way of not making a mistake is to do nothing, which in itself is a biggest mistake. But I really think being forthcoming and admitting your mistakes is a big way to build trust.
Todd Foley: So, I think what’s interesting is, obviously, in your role in what your teams do, it’s based on data. But data itself doesn’t necessarily always engender trust in that there can be discrepancies in data, there can be challenges, and sometimes there’s just people interpret data a little bit differently.
Shruti Sharma: Sometimes when we are getting into certain conversations, I do point out certain things is that data is a proxy, a messenger, if you must, of whatever is happening at the ground level. So be very mindful of only scrubbing the data. Really embrace the discrepancies you see, figure out where they come from. Again, in some ways, it goes back to creating visibility for it. So, tracking lineage, making that more visible to teams, having good definitions around KPIs and terms that we use – because there are sometimes very legitimate reasons for marketing team to use a certain terminology and for like an operational team to use a certain terminology. And there are reasons why the numbers need to be different. So, it’s important to have a common vocabulary when you’re talking about something. We can’t assume that we know what the other team is talking about. So, some of it comes down to creating visibility and engaging within the context rather than fixating on a number.
Todd Foley: Well, you mentioned trends. I think there’s probably no more volatile area these days than in the data in the analytics space with everything that’s going on with AI. In that kind of volatility, it’s really tough to keep cohesive, high performing teams together and to give them kind of consistent vision so that you continue to deliver to the business effectively. How do you manage that volatility? How do you keep your teams cohesive and high performing?
Shruti Sharma: I think there is so much work that has happened in the space of creating really performing teams. And while it continues to evolve with each generation, the fundamentals, I think, largely remain the same. You’ve got to create a space where there’s psychological safety, where people are empowered, and they feel safe and heard and seen when they want to raise their hand, when they want to express a differing point of view. There’s no point in having like really smart people with diverse point of views if they don’t feel empowered to bring their wisdom and share it with the rest of the team. So sometimes it’s important to pause and see if you’re hearing dissent. Productive dissent is central to innovation. It’s even more important you’re creating consensus in many ways. Productive dissent is something that I hold like really close to my heart, and psychological safety goes really hand in hand with both these things. If you’ve got these factors play out, you’re really able to use the collective wisdom of your entire team. And sometimes it really helps to also differentiate between or like let people know, like this is our discussion phase. Let’s bring our ideas. Let’s bring what you think to the table. And at some point, you’re going to have to tell them, now we are in our decision phase. We are going to be making certain calls. And for better or for worse, a lot of times when there’s a fork in the road, it’s because there is an imperfect choice to be made. There isn’t a clear good and a bad choice. And at that point, I think it’s on you as a leader. And then you make that work, or you pivot once you have more data or more insight. But I mean, that decision rests on you as a leader, good or bad.
Todd Foley: Thank you for joining me today. For those who are listening to this for more interviews and insights, please visit cdomagazine.tech. And Shruti, thank you. It’s truly been a pleasure.
Shruti Sharma: Thank you, Todd. Thanks so much.
