There's a certain art to building a data and technology organization that looks busy, costs a fortune, and produces almost nothing of lasting value. It doesn't happen by accident. It takes years of careful hiring, deliberate avoidance of accountability, and an unshakeable commitment to calling everything a win. Having observed this craft up close, I feel obligated to document it — if only so future generations know what not to do.
Welcome to the Bank data organization. Pull up a chair. Try not to trip over the unused pipelines.
The Architects of Mediocrity: JK and TD
Every great dysfunction starts at the top, and ours is no exception.
JK — EMG — is, by all accounts, a pleasant man. Genuinely. He smiles, he travels to the office locations, he checks in, he goes back home. Remote, of course. He was hired by a senior EMG a few years back, not because of any particular expertise in data or analytics, but because of the time-honored tradition of hiring people you already know and like. He came in with a VP title inflated from a Director-level role at his previous company — a clever move to give him parity with the business-side VP he'd be working alongside.
In over three years, he has produced exactly zero vision or roadmaps. Not a draft. Not a napkin sketch. Nothing. His leadership philosophy, as best as anyone can tell, is: trust your people, avoid politics, and don't make waves. Noble in a yoga studio. Catastrophic in a technology organization.
TD is the other half of this leadership duo — the one who actually knows technology, or at least knows how to talk about it. Specifically, he knows how to talk about Capital One. If you've ever wondered what it was like to work at Capital One circa whenever he was there, just ask him. Any meeting, any problem, any question — "At Capital One, we did it this way." He is smart. That's not the issue. The issue is that being smart and leading well are two very different skills, and he has fully committed to only one of them.
Together, these two have built a leadership culture where looking busy is rewarded, spending budget is celebrated, and asking "but what value does this actually deliver?" is considered rude.
TD's Cabinet of People Leaders
Under TD, you'll find a collection of leaders who share one common trait: they care deeply about their people in the most technically useless way possible.
LA has been with the organization for forty years. Forty. Years. In that time, she has apparently absorbed very little about data, technology, or how to lead an engineering team. What she brings to the table is unclear to most observers, including, one suspects, she herself.
BK runs the platform team, which does legitimately solid work — Snowflake optimization, platform oversight, the kind of stuff that actually matters. The catch? It only matters for the Bank. The same work that could be driving cost savings across every line of business in the association stays neatly siloed because TD likes having a showcase team. Why share the glory? Why scale the savings? That would be efficient, and efficiency doesn't make you look as important.
SK is officially a strategy leader. In practice, she is an executioner who has confused the two. She runs what she believes is a strategy team, propped up by strong engineers who do the actual heavy lifting. She is also the department's most reliable source of complaints — about her team, about leadership, about the general state of things — all delivered faithfully in meetings where decisions are supposed to be made. The irony of a "strategy leader" who reacts rather than plans appears to be lost on her. She has mastered a different kind of influence: the victim narrative.
JK's Bench: Where Careers Go to Coast
If TD's side is a people-leadership museum, JK's side of the org is where engineering standards go to retire early.
MJ came in as a project manager. Through a combination of timing, access to the right interim leader, and sheer persistence, she ascended to Director. She does not know how to run a project. She does not know how to manage a team. She does know how to be present when a vacancy appears, which, it turns out, is enough.
MW is perhaps the most complete embodiment of the organization's dysfunction. His job security, many believe, owes something to the fact that his wife is an AVP on the Bank application side. His team's job security owes something to the fact that businesses keep asking for things and he keeps building them — no questions asked. One file. One expensive data pipeline. One expensive Tableau dashboard. One "big win." Repeat indefinitely. Nobody asks whether the business actually needed it. Nobody asks if the data supports a decision or just decorates a meeting. The business asked. he built it. Done.
GB is a long-tenured director who is — genuinely — a great project/department finance manager. This note is not sarcastic. he is kind, approachable, and his engineers feel heard....again to only those reporting to him. Unfortunately, feeling heard is not the same as getting better at your job, and he offers nothing in the way of technical guidance.
The MVP - DM deserves his own paragraph, possibly his own chapter. He is a director who has reduced technology leadership to a single question: how do I spend this budget before someone takes it away? He leads many teams and many of them does not add meaningful value to the Bank. His genius, if you can call it that, is his unwavering belief that having a budget and spending a budget are the same thing as delivering value.
The Engineer Problem Nobody Wants to Solve
Here is the uncomfortable truth underneath all of this: approximately 75% of the engineers in this organization do not have deep technical skills in the data they support. The workflow is simple — an analyst writes code, the engineer wraps it in a pipeline, and everyone celebrates. That's it. That's the whole thing.
This is partly a legacy issue. The previous executive, AD, forced higher employee contractor ratio, which leaders took a short cut through heavy H1B visa hiring. The result is a large workforce where many engineers are underutilized, underdeveloped, and scrambling for meaningful work. The right response to this would be right-sizing the team, investing in skills development, and building a leaner, higher-output organization.
The actual response has been for JK and TD to go back to the business every year, ask for more budget, get it, spend it on more of the same, and call it growth.
The Members Nobody Is Thinking About
Let's not forget who this organization ultimately exists to serve: the members of the association. Real people. People whose financial lives depend on this institution making good decisions with their money — including decisions about how to invest in technology.
Every reckless pipeline, every budget-hoarding director, every people manager who can't coach an engineer, every roadmap that was never written — it all trickles down. Not to JK. Not to TD. To the members.
Nobody in a leadership meeting appears to be asking: does this help our members? It is, perhaps, the most damning thing of all.
This isn't just a rant. Here's the contrast that makes all of this so frustrating:
A roadmap. Any roadmap. One with a direction.
Technology leaders who can actually mentor engineers.
A shared services model that scales good work across lines of business.
Budget tied to outcomes, not to the fear of losing it.
Engineers who are challenged, developed, and given real problems to solve.
A leadership question asked in every meeting: how does this help our members?
None of this is radical. None of this is expensive. It just requires leadership that came to lead — not to coast, not to protect territory, not to spend budget for the sake of it.
Until then, the pipelines will keep getting built. The dashboards will keep getting launched. And somewhere, a business analyst will hand an engineer a script, and someone will call it a win.