[al_borland]

In invested time to develop more soft skills around the other side of the job. If poor decisions were being made, or taking too long, I’d use my skills to gather data, then worked to get better at presenting that data in ways that would matter to the people who needed to make these decision, so the choice became more obvious.

I’m not a data scientist by trade, but ended up spending a lot of time with data to help drive decision to move the ball forward in the areas I felt needed to move forward.

But of course, any sufficiently large company is going to have some level of bureaucracy that slows things down. It’s the nature of the beast.

I found side projects helped for this. I’ve had one long-running side project at work for over 10 years now. Whenever things are moving slow and I’m waiting, or I just need to tinker and learn something new, that’s where I go. It’s useful for the company, it has a few hundred internal users, most probably don’t even know who I am, but it mostly exists as a place for me to tinker.