Erica Louie

The View on Data recorded live at dbt Summit 2026, five women from dbt Labs, Faith McKenna, Erica Louie, Paige Berry, Grace Goheen, and Jerrie Kenney, get honest about the parts of a data career that never show up in a job description.

"Look at these beautiful dbt models! Why are we still experiencing the same friction with stakeholders?" This talk from experts at dbt Labs argues that we solved the first stage of building "Transformations" (via the 2024 State of Analytics Engineering report) and now we're now in the second stage: "The Philosophy of Transformations".

This is an overview of how the dbt Labs Data team is structured, how we interact with the greater org, the general operations, and the expectations/responsibilities that are helping us become a self-service organization.

We've all been there — two people come to a meeting with different values for the same metric, and time is spent discussing how the metric was calculated, rather than how to impact it.