Day in the Life: Q&A with Director of Services Tracy Diel

How would you describe your role on the Implementation & Services team? 

I’m the Director of Services and I oversee the team that coordinates the delivery of EA’s products, analytics, research, and other services for our partners. A big part of my role is helping connect what our partners need with EA’s technical and research expertise and supporting our teams in ensuring we are delivering what matters and is useful for our partners. 

What interested you in working at EA? 

Before joining EA, I spent about ten years working for Denver Public Schools in accountability, research, and assessment. I really valued being close to the problems educators were trying to solve, and I was also interested in broadening the kinds of questions I worked on and doing that work across different education agencies. 
 
EA was a really great fit in that way because it has this unusual combination of really deep technical and research expertise and a genuine interest in making that expertise useful. We engage with our partners to help answer their important questions, and are trying to build things and solve problems that states and districts can actually use. 

We know that every day is different, but what would a typical day at EA look like for you? 

I’m not sure there really is a typical day, which makes things interesting! I spend a lot of time in meetings, but they can be about very different things. I might start the day talking through a complicated project with one of our delivery leads, meet with a partner to brainstorm metrics that they’re interested in analyzing, work with researchers or analysts to resolve a technical question, and then shift to something more tactical like budgets and contracts, or how we manage work across the division.

A lot of my day is essentially translation and problem-solving: What is the partner really trying to accomplish? What does the data tell us? What is technically possible? Who do we need to bring together to think through the problem and its solution? And how do we turn all of that into something we can deliver? 

What skills do you possess that you find helpful in your role? 

Being able to move between the big picture and the details is one of the more useful skills in my role. My research and technical background helps me engage with our technical teams, ask useful questions, and help translate that work into how we deliver products and services to partners--while relying on the people on those teams who are the true technical experts. At the same time, I really enjoy thinking about strategy, project management, communication, and people. Being able to move between those worlds is useful, and also quite fun.

What is the most rewarding aspect of your role? 

The people. EA has a lot of people who are exceptionally good at what they do, and I enjoy helping create the conditions for them to do their best work. Sometimes that means helping someone on my team work through a complicated problem. Sometimes it means connecting people across teams, or even organizations. Sometimes it’s helping the team make a decision and move forward when there isn’t a perfect answer. And underneath all of that is the reason we do the work – helping education agencies make better use of their data to understand what’s happening for students and make better decisions.

What is your favorite project that you’ve worked on at EA? 

This is hard because I’ve gotten to work on a lot of very cool projects. Some of my favorite work has been with our larger partnerships where research, analytics, data infrastructure, and products all come together. South Carolina is a good example of this. I’ve been able to work on everything from growth models and predictions to dashboards, linking studies, and broader questions about how the state uses data and translates it into useful information for educators.  

If you had to choose a different team to work on at EA, which team would you pick and why? 

Probably Research. I previously led research work at EA and still really enjoy it. My background is research, evaluation, and accountability, and I love the process of starting with an interesting question and figuring out what the data can tell us. Luckily, my current role lets me wander into Research’s work often enough that I don't have to choose for real.

What changes do you anticipate in your field in the next year? 

AI is obviously changing how we work, but I think the more interesting question is what happens when better tools are paired with better data infrastructure. Education has enormous amounts of data, but getting that data connected, usable, and into the hands of the right people is still much harder than it should be. 

I think AI can seriously change how quickly we write code, explore data, synthesize information, and build things, but it can’t fix bad data or tell us which questions are worth asking. I think that makes the human parts of this work more important: understanding context, exercising judgment, recognizing when an answer doesn’t make sense, communicating uncertainty, and figuring out what information will genuinely help someone make a better decision.

 
What is something you enjoy in your free time? 

I love cooking and gardening and have lately rediscovered a love of step aerobics. I spend a ton of time with my seven-year-old building LEGOs, drawing, and carting him around to karate. I like having things that let me be creative and active – and just having fun and playing like a kid.

When you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up? 

I wanted to be a chef…or maybe a caterer or personal chef. I loved cooking and especially loved the idea of bringing people together and making them happy through food. I quickly realized, though, that the stress and intensity of a professional kitchen were probably not for me. So cooking stayed something I love rather than becoming my career, which was the right call. 

What is something that you would tell your younger self about your career? 

Follow smart, good people. Of course, you want the work itself to be interesting and motivating, but I’ve learned that, for me, working with people I respect, trust, and enjoy learning from trumps almost everything else. 
 
I’d also tell myself not to worry too much about following a straight path. I started my career as a school social worker before realizing that direct service wasn’t quite the right place for me. I was more drawn to supporting students through research, data, and technology, and from there my work has expanded into leadership, products, project delivery, and strategy. Following interesting problems, and, most importantly, great people, has led me on a solid path.