Data Salon: Systems Thinking, part 2

An event series for fostering thought leadership across data disciplines and those who work closely with data practitioners. More details on our two featured speakers to come shortly! MC'd by Akpanoluo Etteh, Sr. Director of Data Engineering at Arcspan (fmr: Anthropic, Bandcamp) and founder of The Soundshop music salon series, and co-hosted by Michael Bartoli, Founder of Newtown Analytics (fmr: obé Fitness) Featured speakers are Jean Haley and Jenny Kim; you can find details on their talks below: Jean Haley is a site reliability engineer who spent several weeks building a headless AI agent on a dedicated laptop. What began as a simple Telegram relay to a backend AI model grew into a full home assistant that monitors his home lab, tracks weather, manages network traffic, and delivers daily news summaries. This talk walks through how building the pieces first led, almost by accident, to a coherent platform. Jenny Kim is a principal product manager who designed and influenced sales goals and incentives across industries to drive growth. She will be walking through an example working in the Consumer Packaged Goods industry where she had to confront how upstream incentives shaped downstream data and how measurement systems were key to drive the intended behavior. It is a talk focused on why the choices we make about inputs, incentives, and proxies determine whether the metrics capture the behavior we intend to measure.