It's a made up story based on n-th hand experiences (for n ≤ 3), and quite opinionated. It's a story about teams and organization, not the tech itse

The data team: a short story

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2021-07-08 02:30:03

It's a made up story based on n-th hand experiences (for n ≤ 3), and quite opinionated. It's a story about teams and organization, not the tech itself. As a minor note, I deliberately use the term “data scientist” to mean something very broad.

It's your first day as head of the data team at SuperCorp! The CEO gave a quick but passionated pitch during your interview process how the world is changing and how the company needs to keep up with all the crazy data stuff going on. They whole exec team is super psyched.

The first few hours, you get access to all the major systems. You start browsing around in the Git repo and discover some interesting code. It looks like a neural network for churn prediction. You start to parse through the code but you're interrupted by a calendar notification that you have a 30 minute intro meeting with the Chief Marketing Officer.

The CMO is super energetic. “We're so excited you're here”, she says. “I recently talked to my buddy at HyperCorp who runs marketing and they are working with a vendor to use AI for user segmentation. Pretty cool! I can't wait for you to sink your teeth into it.” After a bit of chit chat, you start to probe into the data practices of the marketing team. “How is the customer acquisition cost looking”, you ask? “Well…", the CMO says, “pretty awesome actually. Our data scientist ran the numbers, and our online ad cost per click keeps going down.”