Reflections on titles

I've been running a data function for ten years now. A couple of quick notes on how titles have changed, as a way of illustrating how far the field has come.

1. The lexicon didn't exist yet.

When I first laid out the structure of the office, I didn't have the right words for the roles I needed. I requested a "program manager" and a "data analyst." The program manager became what we'd now call a data analyst: the person who works directly with the business unit. What I called the "data analyst" back then is what we'd now call a data engineer.

The terms just didn't hit right, because the field hadn't settled on the vocabulary yet. Stakeholders pushed back: "why do you need a 'program' person? Just let the analyst do the work." What that objection missed is that data movement and structuring for business use is 99% of the job. Illustrating it for the business is comparatively easy. Sorry to the graphic designers of the world, but it's true. Failed pipelines keep me up at night, not color theory.

2. The title had to earn its place.

I've officially been a chief data officer for about three years. I ran the function under other names for seven years before that. Even three years ago, CDO was a brand new addition to the C-suite. To get past resistance to centralized data management under the old regime, we had to tie other functions into data just to make the role legitimate. That sounds bizarre in 2026, but it was standard practice a decade ago.

The upside: I picked up a lot of experience running digital products alongside data analytics and data management at the same time. That combination made me an adherent of the Steve Jobs philosophy. If something is worth doing and worth sharing with other people, it deserves to be treated as a complete, coherent product. Meaning, you look at the back of the metaphorical cabinet you built before you send it out, even if it’s a quick CSV.

That history is part of why it made me wince when AI hit and data engineers started rebranding themselves "ML engineer" on LinkedIn overnight. Setting aside the credential inflation, practitioners on the ground spent years building these domains and integrating them into real operations. That work doesn't transfer with a title change.

How will this play out in the quantum era? My prediction: be skeptical of anyone who rebrands themselves "Quantum Engineer" or "Quantum Data Scientist" overnight with no trail of actual experimentation behind it.

I'm several months into the quantum rabbit hole, with many more ahead of me. This isn't something you learn overnight, and even figuring out how to talk about quantum inside the practitioner space is going to take months on its own.