Bringing an engineering mindset to data teams, with Admiral's James Gardiner

Fibonacci, the Red Olive data podcast

In this episode of Fibonacci, the Red Olive Data Podcast, we interview James Gardiner, head of data technology for Admiral Group. James has 25 years of experience working with data and has been at Admiral for the past seven years, recently managing its move to the cloud.

We chat about the importance of applying an engineering mindset to data projects, data governance, the art of the possible and more in a wide-ranging chat.

Here are the topics we discuss with their timecodes:

• How James got into data engineering (1m)
• The importance of emphasising an engineering mentality to data teams (6m 9s)
• Giving people the data to make good decisions, including live streams and integrating it with sales processes (7m 17s)
• Understanding customers to give them the best price, while balancing risk (9m)
• Scoping a project and getting both the right people and architecture in place (10m 35s)
• The importance of “the why” of a project (12m 42s)
• Security is one of the cloud’s biggest risks: how to manage that with good governance (14m)
• Training a young team to respond well when things go wrong (17m)
• Applying machine learning to monitoring (19m)
• Mesh architecture and ML Ops (20m 18s)
• Communicating well with your team and re-using code (24m 30s)
• Using data governance as an enabler, rather than a blocker (27m 50s)
• Learning from Red Olive (31m)
• The important skills for people to learn, and data automation (33m 18s)