Data leaders translate between evidence and decisions
Technical foundations matter, but leadership depends on understanding what management needs, which levers affect the business and how to turn analysis into a decision that other teams can act on.
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Women in Data · Key takeaways
Building influence before the leadership title
Gabriela Georgieva and Zuzana Vranova discuss the skills, relationships and opportunities that turn strong analytical work into wider influence — and how successful teams connect delivery to business value.
Data leaderGabriela GeorgievaHead of Data (Growth)Babbel
Building towards leadershipZuzana VranovaSenior Data AnalystPayrails
What stood out
Ideas worth carrying forward.
Develop strengths as deliberately as weaknesses
Gabriela’s managers encouraged her to recognise the qualities that distinguished her instead of spending all her energy repairing every technical gap. Good support amplifies potential and makes a leadership path visible earlier.
Influence starts before authority
Make useful work visible, build reciprocal relationships across disciplines and mentor others. Credibility grows when people experience you as approachable, generous and able to connect a specialist contribution to a shared problem.
Replace requests with problem conversations
Reactive ticket delivery rarely moves the organisation forward. Ask what decision or problem sits behind the request, then combine the stakeholder’s context with the analyst’s knowledge to agree a more useful solution.
Remote work requires deliberate connection
Focused work may be easier at home, but informal contact can reveal how different parts of a company fit together. Future leaders should intentionally create those relationships, whether through well-chosen office time or purposeful remote conversations.
Skills, timing and luck work together
Capability creates readiness, timing creates an opening and luck affects which opportunity appears. Make your interest known, watch how the organisation is changing and stay flexible enough to take on responsibility when the moment arrives.
Stay technically curious in the way that suits you
Gabriela used teaching and hands-on work to connect the full data lifecycle and learn unfamiliar tools. Leaders need not master every system, but enough technical awareness helps them challenge choices and guide the team’s development.
Measure impact in organisational language
Completed tickets and story points describe activity, not value. Collaboration, shared ownership, stakeholder satisfaction and evidence of revenue, conversion or cost impact make the contribution of an analytics team easier to understand and celebrate.
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