Meenal Iyer has been in the Data and Analytics space for over 20+ years. She happened to work in data by chance and realized that she had a passion for it and what it could do. This made Meenal stay on that course ever since. Meenal started her career as a Data Engineer at companies like GE Capital, HP, Cisco before she joined Hotwire and truly saw her career trajectory rise. She started at Hotwire as an Engineer and moved into management. From there she worked at Blackhawk Network, Macy's, and is now at Tailored Brands. Meenal has tried to stay industry agnostic so that she can understand the nature of data problems and solutions across industries and it gives her a wider perspective of the data landscape. At Tailored Brands, Meenal serves in the Strategy and Analytics function.  

This team drives data-driven decision making for the enterprise. Meenal consolidates, transforms, and makes data available to the strategy and analytics team and their business partners by managing enterprise analytics and data science platform roadmaps, schedules, and features of the platform. She processes internal and external data sources across business landscapes to ensure sources are incorporated at the raw level and exposed via higher-value data models. Not only does Meenal corroborate with data security and data engineering teams to build a comprehensive and flexible data architecture, but she also conveys complex modeling, statistical, and analytical systems, and other data products to stakeholders in simple terms.  

Additionally, Meenal has been speaking at Big Data, AI, and ML conferences over the past couple of years sharing her experiences with the broader data and analytics community. Besides, she acts as an advisor for the data and analytics communities and governing bodies to discuss issues surrounding privacy, governance, and data literacy and upcoming technological capabilities in AI. Lately, she has been involved in conversations surrounding ethics and governance for AI. 

A Dynamic Leader with a Vision 

Meenal's experiences at each of the companies she has worked at have shaped the person she has become. As an individual contributor at Hotwire, she was put in charge of leading projects end–to–end, meaning success and failure fully fell on her and that for her was very empowering and she used that technique with her directs to this date. Meenal follows the concept of "Completed Staff Work", something which was inculcated in her by her manager. It provides a sense of responsibility and ownership unlike anything else especially if one is an individual contributor. For Meenal, moving from an individual contributor to a manager was hard, but the lesson was that as a manager one's success is defined through the success of the team. That is a very critical lesson for a people leader to be aware of. Another lesson that stuck with her was that learning had to be continuous. The data and analytics space are an extremely fast-growing space and it is important to make time to keep up with learning. Meenal implemented lunch brown bags, partial Fridays for labs and learning, and time–sensitive exercises for teams to catch up with everything that was going on beyond what they were working on. She is proud to say that all her directs have taken this learning with them. She also ensured that her team was cross-trained in all areas of Data and Analytics (ETL, QA, DevOps, Reporting, Analytics). In organizations where budgets and hiring were tight, this became a game–changer and truly a quick way to improve resource bandwidth. 

There were plenty of achievements along the way, but the ones that stood out the most were the migration from one platform to another and building out cloud data architectures from scratch with a team that had no experience doing it before. These achievements stood out for her because they tested her capabilities to adapt to ever–changing technology and environments and issues beyond one's control. 

So, in summary, teams' success is a leader's success and that success can be achieved by inculcating that same learning in the team by cross–training them, playing through their strengths, and empowering them. Meenal says, "Your achievements challenge you and shape you in ways that you never imagine possible." 

Facing Challenges with a Pro-Active Approach 

Given that Meenal's journey has primarily been to make enterprises data-driven, the biggest challenge for her has been in shifting the culture of the organization. This is a continued challenge across all organizations– big or small, and across industries as well. 

She says that the challenge for most organizations is that it has executive support, but lacks open communication about the challenges from bottom to top. The visions and goals do not align and hence organizations are unable to change the culture. Shifting the culture mindset requires continued top-down executive support and effective bottom-up communication and collaboration. According to Meenal, it is a journey that every organization needs to undertake to ensure a successful transformation. 

Guiding the Team with a Problem-Solving Mindset 

Speaking on the attributes of transformational leaders, Meenal asserts that the highest on her list of attributes is an element of vulnerability. Meenal says, "You need to empathize with the team, listen to them, their challenges, opinions and show them respect and you will get a team who will cross mountains with you".  

As a leader, it is very important to have the ability to communicate the vision and strategy effectively to both the team and the business. The team must know there is an alignment of everything that they are doing to a broader organizational vision and plan which makes them vested in the success of the strategy.  

Leadership requires a problem-solving mindset with a "never say never" attitude. Problems to solutions are always available and it is a transformational leader's role to guide their team to look for that solution.  

Additionally, she says that as a data leader evangelizing data, communication is one of the most critical skills to have. The leader has to communicate the importance of data as an asset and communicate to the enterprise regularly on the data that has been democratized, the importance of privacy, governance. Also, it is the responsibility of the data leader to communicate the importance of data literacy and ensuring that data is at the forefront of all business decisions. 

Developing Innovative Offerings for the Enterprise 

Meenal's focus remains on building products/solutions to make enterprises data-driven. This requires a careful balance between democratization and ensuring the governance and security of that data. To make the data product as appealing as possible, enterprises must ensure that access is simple to get and people have the necessary information to get up and running. Besides, tools that traverse the multi-functions should be standardized and made readily available. Data quality is something that needs complete attention as the data outputs will become the products of tomorrow and if the data is not credible it leads to faulty insights and biases. She discusses that data APIs should be made available for integration into applications or outputs for 3rd party with the right protocols in place. The environment should be developer-agnostic (work irrespective of programming language) and serve real-time and batch use cases. Data access and retrieval patterns should be defined and communicated for anyone looking to access the data. Ease of use always ensure quick adoption and successful implementations, Meenal concludes. 

Adopting Digital Transformation for the Future 

Looking forward to a transformational change, Meenal believes that COVID-19 has given companies and industries to execute much more quickly and nimbly. Studies have shown that organizations have implemented in months what they had planned as strategies for years. It has also given them to operate in a leaner fashion and quickly sift through opportunities that would produce sustained ROIs vs just quick wins. Retail has faced that same/similar evolution as well and she sees more of that coming up in the future. It is going to be a couple of years before the economy gets back to the prior COVID normal and Meenal envisions that this behavior is going to continue. Digital transformation in retail is seeing a lot of innovations and challenges to provide the most efficient and seamless omnichannel experience. 

Encouraging Emerging Women Leaders for Success 

Commenting her views for budding women leaders, Meenal says, "As women, we tend to be more emotional and passionate about our opinions, however, what helped me is to always make my conversations very rational. Initially, I used to write down the conversation points to ensure that I did not let my emotion control the conversation. Over time it has become naturally embedded within me and that has helped immensely." Secondly, she advises emerging women leaders not to be afraid to state an opinion if they have one and even if they are the only woman in the room. Emerging women leaders must ensure that their voice is heard. This will be a common occurrence throughout their career as the gender gap is addressed and so they must speak up. A final piece of advice Meenal shares is for all leaders to empower and encourage women to also step up in their roles and be heard. This is a big way in which all leaders can help to close the gender gap.