Oliver Bauer

LEAD - DATA GOVERNANCE, ARCHITECTURE & TECHNOLOGY CHAPTER

What do you like most about your role at Vista? 

• Building structures and systems from an organizational and data perspective to help achieve our collective vision of transforming Vista into one of the world’s most iconic data and analytics driven companies! 
• Leading the organization towards an extremely scalable, decentralized data mesh organization with clear product thinking, ownership and domain boundaries between our data product teams. And working on a super awesome tech stack — we currently have Snowflake, Looker, Databricks, DBT, Alation as well as possibilities to expand AWS services. 
• In Data Governance Architecture and Technology (DGAT), I help to put the right principles, guardrails and best practices in place, and ensure there’s proper monitoring around these. This includes clarification of unclear data domain ownership, improving our tech stack, reviewing architectural patters of data products, and pushing our practices towards a more industry-leading standard (e.g., regarding DevOps and automation) 

What does your day-to-day look like? 

• Many Zooooooom Meetings. 
• Silent working time to review proposals and new ideas. I also spend time writing 6-pager papers to express desired changes and point of views. 
• Walking outside to reflect on progress and the bigger picture. 
• Lunch at 12:00 CET 😉  

What’s the biggest challenge you’ve overcome in your role/team/ area? 

• Overall challenge: Starting with 0 data product teams and no data domain model. To guiding the organization towards 25 data product teams working with a clearly defined data domain model and clear operating principles (e.g., every team needs a PO, agile practices, documentation etc.) 
• DGAT Challenge: Moving towards better organization and documentation of our data with data governance, as well as pushing our data platform from tools to integrated solutions for our data product teams. 

Why is Vista a great partner for small businesses? 

• Because Vista significantly simplifies all marketing activities for small businesses. 
• We help small businesses re-invest the time and money (otherwise spent on many nitty-gritty pieces that Vista takes care of) into improving product-market fit and ultimately into things that really matter to them. 

What do you do when you’re not working? 

• You will find me either somewhere outside riding with my gravel bike, doing cross-fit like HIIT, or hiking in the Alps. 
• Or your will find me reading books, coding on some private projects, or experimenting with crypto stuff. 

Freestyle – anything else you´d want to add or call out? 

Besides my role as chapter lead in DGAT, I also oversee the Growth & Change Headquarter and the Data Engineering Chapter.