Day 1 — Welcome to the Minefield

Your first morning at Target starts with a 7:30 AM Zoom call from your home office. You were hired to work remotely — Target's data & analytics team went fully distributed during 2020 and never went back. Nithya Rajan, your manager, is already on camera when you join. Behind her, you can see a home office with a whiteboard covered in what looks like a data architecture diagram.

"Welcome to Target. I'm going to give you the real version, not the HR version," she says, adjusting her headset. "This project has been approved, funded, and staffed. Technically, it's one of the most straightforward things we've done — Snowflake, dbt, Fivetran, standard modern data stack. Derek Chen designed a solid architecture. Slalom is a good partner. On paper, this should be a twelve-month sprint to a unified data platform."

She pauses. Leans forward.

"But this project isn't about technology. It's about getting four business units to share data for the first time in Target's history. Merchandising has run their own analytics kingdom for fifteen years. Marketing wants everything yesterday. Supply Chain barely knows what they have. Digital thinks they already solved this problem on their own. And every one of them believes their data domain should be migrated first."

Nithya pulls up a Slack message on her screen share. It's from Mark Schindele, EVP of Stores and Merchandising, sent last Friday at 11:47 PM: *'Nithya — I need to understand why Merchandising is scheduled as Wave 3 in Slalom's proposal when we're paying 20% of the budget. Let's discuss Monday.'*

"That message is your first assignment," Nithya says. "Mark is the most important stakeholder on this project. If he disengages, his data stewards don't show up, his analysts don't validate, and Wave 3 becomes a ghost. I need you to figure out how to handle him — and I need you to do it without promising him Wave 1, because Cara Sylvester has already told Brett Craig that Marketing going first is non-negotiable."