Her Story
About Taguma
My career path has been quite an interesting journey. Early on, I took a job and requested a month off to get married. When I returned, there had been a reorganization and I was so new that I was accidentally left off the seating chart. The only seat available was over by the IT department, where I sat next to a guy named Aruni Upadhyay. I would open up tickets for whatever I needed, and he would run some SQL and get me an answer. I thought, oh, I like that. But the challenge was that my tickets weren't always a priority for him, so I figured if I could learn SQL, I could solve my own problems and free up time to do other things. I've always been a very curious person and I like to work efficiently. I started learning SQL and started solving my own problems, and my career took off from there. I initially studied psychology in college, so I did not have a data career in mind, but I'm glad this is where I ended up. I took on more and more roles in the data space - an operations research analyst role doing market basket analyses, then a data modeler role building out data warehouses, then an analytics role building out analytics and reporting suites. Now I'm in leadership and running a business. One of my most notable achievements was working with my current co-founder two companies ago, where he brought me in to help start a Power BI practice for the organization and we were able to scale from a team of about 40 to maybe 250. Then starting Maverick Data has been incredible - it's one thing to have an idea on your own, but being able to find people that believe in the dream and try to build this thing with you has been great. As co-founder, I wear many hats - I'm HR, client relationship and success manager, and I lead the delivery side while my co-founder leads the sales organization. My day-to-day includes stand-ups with my team, discovery calls to assess scope of engagement, writing proposals, posting jobs, interviewing to grow the team, financial forecasting, staffing and capacity planning, client management, and trying to land and expand new deals within organizations.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Taguma
01What do you attribute your success to?
I would attribute my success to a number of things. One is that curiosity - I've always been a curious person. Even as a child, I used to take apart the remotes and see if I could put them back together, one to figure out how they worked, but two to see if I can do it with fewer parts. I was less successful with that second part, but I've always wanted to know things, and that characteristic has probably been the most helpful in my career. Second, I come from a line of strong and powerful people that have sort of defied the odds at every turn. My grandfather was the first Black manager at Lever Brothers Zimbabwe, and this was in a time when that wasn't a thing. My grandmother was a nurse that went to the UK for training, came back and opened up a nursing school and trained people. My dad was the resident representative for Ghana - my parents worked for the UN. My mom was a leader at what was called UNICEFM, I think it's called UNICEF now. She was one of the first people to interview the child soldiers. So you know, I stand on the shoulders of giants.
02What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
I would say there is so much information at your fingertips now - take advantage of that. Learn everything that you can. Be curious about all of the things. I would also say it's important to network and meet other people, like-minded people in your industry and field, because not everybody is getting jobs off of LinkedIn and Indeed. A lot of these hiring decisions and opportunities are happening because someone knows someone who knows someone, so be that someone that someone knows. The next thing I would say is that relationships matter. In order to cultivate and nurture healthy relationships, you also have to be a person of your word. So put some responsibility on yourself to learn the things, know the things, be trustworthy, but then also build relationships that can open doors for you.
03What values are most important to you in your work and personal life?
The values most important to me are the things I tell my kids every day on their way to school: be kind, be diligent, be hardworking. Those are the things that I incorporate into my own day-to-day work, the things that I'm trying to teach them are also the things that kind of motivate me. One of the famous catchphrases that I've coined, and I think that many people who know me attribute to me, is 'one team one dream' - we're all in this together. We benefit from our shared experience, and so I want for everyone to feel like they have a voice, and that it matters, and that their voice helps to shape the decisions that we make, whether it's at home or at Maverick Data.
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