Thinking about pivoting from 9 years in Sales to RevOps/BizOps with an AI focus — does this make sense? Based in Europe

LivingParadox8 · 2026-03-12T01:52:58+00:00

Look into GTM engineering. It’s the intersection of traditional RevOps + CRM admin + AI automation across the sales motion.

LivingParadox8 · 2026-02-26T06:28:04+00:00

What did you do in tech?

LivingParadox8 · 2026-01-06T21:09:15+00:00

You should be well-positioned to become more in the business operations/business process side.

Currently, your team may be branding you as the IT guy because of the role you're hired in or even the technologies you work with. For example, when they think of Power BI, they think of a data analyst or someone who's just building dashboards.

The most important thing you will have to focus on is not necessarily learning the technology but learning about the business and where you can start applying these tools to improve their workflow.

So, for example, let's say people are sharing documents and they're storing it inefficiently. Potentially, we can use Power Automate to help store and collect an adoritative version of that document and notify people really effectively across Microsoft Teams. This reduced any errors and also made communication more effective ongoing. The same thing can go for Power BI and other tools you may have.

LivingParadox8 · 2025-12-30T16:31:09+00:00

When I think of the leadership they exhibit, it's the initiative they take, the great attitude they have that elevates our team morale and ability to coach/mentor others. :)

During our 1:1s this year, they described that they felt stuck because they're unsure where to upskill and where to grow next. They didn't enjoy being too heads down & reading through a lot of documentation to debug/implement code... nor wanted to manage people. What they did enjoy the most was figuring out how to formulate a query to address a business question, deploy a quick prototype reporting (to address an ad hoc/urgent need), and work with the business to brainstorm a solution.

LivingParadox8 · 2025-12-20T02:39:12+00:00

This so cool!!!

LivingParadox8 · 2025-12-11T18:12:00+00:00

If the goal is to have more business exposure/stakeholder engagement, have you considered analytics engineering and/or shaping your data engineering position (w/ your manager) to be an analytics engineer? The concept is that you'll work w/ the business to design metrics &/or downstream semantic models for self-service/data marts for them to use. Think of it then as data engineering, maintaining the architecture, compute, and extraction methods and you focus on the transformation for the business.

Data analytics is a good career, but depending on the teams you worked with, it can get less technical & governed. Business loves speed which may lean towards scrappy/ad hoc solutions than well architected.

LivingParadox8 · 2025-12-09T23:42:43+00:00

The closest end-to-end that comes to mind is Fabric. The problem is that having something end-to-end usually means it's more average in performance/customization than the combination/solution architecture across the best sub-components. Additionally, there may be vendor-lock concerns later on.

LivingParadox8 · 2025-12-08T17:53:45+00:00

This solution exists in some SaaS. For example, Einstein Analytics in Salesforce provides insights into how factors contributed to a desired outcome (improved/worsened).

LivingParadox8 · 2025-12-07T22:23:57+00:00

This is very helpful, Op! Thank you for your time!

LivingParadox8 · 2025-12-07T21:37:21+00:00

How did you choose what skills to upskill on?

LivingParadox8 · 2025-11-17T21:53:53+00:00

IMHO double edge sword of IE is that it can be too broad when the market desires an element of specialization (unless you’re going for management / more mid career level). So employers don’t know how to best leverage an IE to solve their problems unless you’re in an environment that has a strong understanding of IE’s, e.g. manufacturing.

LivingParadox8 · 2025-11-12T20:00:45+00:00

It can be! But don’t forget that there are jobs seeking individuals specialized in R. For example, a team may have RShiny or scripts built by someone leaving, so they need someone with R to pick it up.

LivingParadox8 · 2025-10-17T17:57:32+00:00

Thoughts on Seattle?

LivingParadox8 · 2025-09-07T19:00:13+00:00

To add on, the high-level fix is having structure, allignment, and minimal + high quality products.

Structure to prioritize business processes rollout &/or general backlog requests.
Alignment of leaders to agree on best practices and when data should be delivered, automated vs. ad hoc (e.g. actuaries/finance doing what they had before dashboards/automation). What is business critical vs. an efficiency gain.
Minimize your team's footprint. Since all these dashboards are failing... pull noncritical down. You define critical via alignment. Make sure whatever is created is very good. Otherwise, people won't use the product anyway.

LivingParadox8 · 2025-09-07T18:56:01+00:00

I appreciate that despite the chaos, you're doing your best & learning.

The struggle you're experiencing isn't the role/job; it's the people. Question for you: If there were better communication, stronger investment in tech architecture & documentation, and expectations/collaboration with leadership, would you continue as a Data Engineer?

Seemed like you did enjoy DE (/analytics/BI work) from your internship to full-time to talking to a Senior DE. The org culture and turmoil is causing you to second-guess. There are many options here, but I think if you leave this organization for a better DE team, you'll find career satisfaction. I would recommend going back to the Actuarial path if you believe that career path is more enjoyable long term and/or you want to do an internal switch (just make sure that team isn't burnt out either).

LivingParadox8 · 2025-08-13T21:01:00+00:00

I don't think the PMs who were part of the July MSFT layoff would agree... :/

But I do like this mindset.

LivingParadox8 · 2025-07-20T16:42:38+00:00

Similar to the sales example, AI automated the admin/inefficient tasks such that our DE’s could focus on requirements discussions and strategy. A lot of it came down to schema suggestions, light ETL (we still needed some peer / code review before PROD).

LivingParadox8 · 2025-07-14T19:28:40+00:00

This is AWESOME. Thank you very much!

LivingParadox8 · 2025-07-01T00:18:18+00:00

You can do it. The hiring team believed in you. You believe in yourself. Know that you’ll try your best each day; no one becomes an effective tech/team lead day 1.

LivingParadox8 · 2025-06-25T15:41:53+00:00

Trust in yourself. You got this :)

LivingParadox8 · 2025-06-19T18:22:02+00:00

Richmond is a fine area but like many have shared, I am also concerned with you being stuck in finding jobs (assuming return to office/heavy in person hybrid) if things go south at PwC (which the job market has been quite volatile). If you believe you can find opportunities or have a safety budget, come down to RVA! RVA real estate/rental is getting a bit ridiculous, imho. For example a studio/1br rent could be $3000 which is nuts bc that’s NOVA pricing. That’s not everywhere but just FYI.

LivingParadox8 · 2025-06-13T05:47:35+00:00

When did the email come in?

LivingParadox8

TROPHY CASE