Headline Partner

Kate Sargent, Chief Data Officer, Financial Times

Describe your career to date

I studied Maths at university and then a MSc in Operational Research before a chance job advert for an Analyst role at the National Air Traffic Services provided my first introduction to analysis and data science.

From this point on, I knew that a career in analytics and, later, data was for me. I moved around through several well-known consumer brands including easyJet, Tesco, Ocado, Sky and TUI, each time expanding the breadth of my role and learning about different cultures and how to work with, and influence, different types of people. With each move, my team size grew and, with it, an emerging passion for people management and leadership.

I took up my first Director of Data and Analytics role at Collinson back in 2020, just as the pandemic was getting underway, and successfully steered the function through an extremely difficult period in the company’s history. I kept the team together, created a culture that I remain very proud of today, and established Data and Analytics as a function worthy of a pillar within the corporate strategy. After another year, I was promoted to SVP Data and Analytics.

Restructuring towards the end of 2022 saw my role evolve and I took up a new position of Chief Data Officer at the Financial Times. I have now been in this role since April 2023 and am thoroughly enjoying bringing all my experience to bear in a new sector and in an organisation with a unique culture.

Data literacy is a key enabler of the value and impact from data. How are you approaching this within your organisation?

I could not agree more. I have a direct reporting function in my current role that is responsible for improving the engagement with, adoption of, and impact from data across the organisation.

Since I joined the FT last year, we have launched two key initiatives. Firstly, a Metrics that Matter initiative to define and embed a metrics framework within each of our key business functions that ties back to our company North Star. This is a great mechanism for encouraging all parts of the business to think about their end outcomes, the drivers of these, and how data can help both track and inform these outcomes going forwards.

Secondly, last autumn we launched our first Data Academy with workshop-style and downloadable content across subjects as broad as data storytelling, how to use Looker (our BI tool) and an introduction to generative AI. This had over 700 bookings in its first month with over 200 employees having already attended training in some form within that time. It has been a huge success.

The next initiative in flight aims to embed a process for valuing the analytics that we perform – whether this is producing a dashboard, a deep-dive piece of strategic analytics or operationalising a data science model. This in turn will be used to help the business (and us) understand where the big value drivers are and to better prioritise our efforts and investments.

What stage has your organisation reached on its data maturity journey?

Last year, I inherited a Data and Analytics team that was already delivering excellent tactical analytics across the organisation, increasingly through business-embedded analysts. Our function is very well regarded and relied upon on a day-to-day basis to answer a very broad variety of business questions with data. We have deployed low-latency ML models at scale and have a mature metrics definition and management process in place. As an organisation we have a fortnightly Data (and now AI) Governance Council, attended by a Board-level audience, a Generative AI Usage Policy (which I was asked to co-author as CDO), and we also have a very close working relationship with Internal Comms and Learning and Development for much of our engagement and adoption activity.

We are already at a mid-high maturity level, but we would benefit even more from a vision for Data and Analytics within the FT, in as much as it adds value to the broader organisation. The big opportunity is to think about this holistically or strategically. There are several ways to conceive of its role in future strategy setting, or new product creation, and to articulate this for the business. One of the starting points for this is to embed a data ownership model across the organisation to democratise not just our insights but quality data creation in the first place. This, for me, is the next level of maturity for us and why my role is so exciting.

Kate Sargent
has been included in:

100 Brands 2020 (EMEA)
100 Brands 2021 (EMEA)
100 Brands 2024 (EMEA)

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