Time for a new adventure

I spent roughly 20 years in the digital analytics industry. At first it was a side quest next to my IT job. Over the years it grew into a profession, and for the last 11 1/2 years I did nothing else at DHL. Time to say:

Thank you, dear, wonderful, heartwarming, open, honest, respectful, and amazing Digital Analytics Community. Thanks to everyone in this community for answering my questions, when I got stuck in tools, for helping with your thoughts about strategic projects, or just for memes that made me chuckle. I will always remember how Jan Exner opened doors to fantastic discussion and a network around Adobe Analytics/Launch/Target, just because he started to talk to a stranger from Bonn who had questions. Then there was a measure bowling where I didn’t know anyone when I joined, and I found my #measure twin, Yael Farkas. Or how two guys from the US called Randy Zwitch and Jason Thompson started a discussion with me on Twitter about an open source analytics knowledge hub, which we later on created on GitHub. Michael Helbig was curious about this person named oarsi on MeasureChat, who didn’t have a LinkedIn profile (just the German clone Xing) but wanted to talk about analytics.

But also this community showed me that strangers become friends and do help each other, regardless of the topic. Like Andreas Dierl who, without a question, jumped in as an Adobe Summit guide and helped out with knowledge, a network, and with “just” being there. Jenn Kunz and Kelly Wortham who listened when I needed to talk about ADHD and family. Jim Gordon, Yehoshua Core and Jason started a food bubble on Twitter, which led to my #KitchenZen hashtag. Or arriving at Superweek for the first time and being welcomed by Zoli as if I am a longtime attendee.

It also showed me you don’t need to meet people in person to become friends, but then you try to find possibilities to finally meet or even work with them. Like Lukas Cech, who is nowadays even a colleague, I first met him at a conference talking about Adobe Analytics over a coffee. Not to mention Frederik Werner, whom I just knew by chance from some Friday analytics coffee calls from a small group of analysts. So many more situations I remember, so many people I will never forget and am thankful to know and have met.

In the last couple of years I circled the same topics multiple times and tried different ways of solving those. I am getting a little fatigued seeing so many marketers still not having sufficient technical skills/knowledge, the business having too much to do, and refusing to work properly with data. I still see people using vanity metrics and chasing performance reports instead of hypothesis analysis to find potential changes. Analysts who are chasing the newest tech stacks or focusing just on collecting data instead of understanding the business to help them do proper analysis. Perhaps I have seen some of these too often and got stuck myself. Being too deep in the tunnel sometimes doesn’t let you properly see what is going on left and right next to you. It also doesn’t help to blame others but to see where I need to change. I will work on my mindset because I still want to help people in the field of digital analytics with my knowledge.

Now it is time for a new adventure, same company, different job. The main part of the new job is still caring about people, but it is not directly tied to the topic of digital analytics. From November onwards I will be part of a small team called SmartSolutions IoT. But more about the new topic in a future post.