Why Every Data Team Should Hire a Copy Editor Before They Hire Another Data Engineer

The average data team has many people who can build a pipeline and almost no one whose job is to make the output legible.

This is a strange inversion. The pipeline exists to produce insight. The insight is useless if it cannot be communicated. Yet the team is structured as if the hard part is the infrastructure.

A copy editor — or more broadly, someone who thinks professionally about language, clarity, and reader experience — would do more to improve the impact of most data teams than another engineer would. They would fix the chart titles. They would challenge the jargon. They would ask “what does this mean?” until the answer was short enough to be useful.

This is a deliberately overstated position. Take it as a provocation.