O’Reilly Report: Leading Data Science Teams

Here’s what’s inside:

Leading a data science team presents a lot of challenges. Compared to other functions of an organization, data science tends to be highly speculative. A leader of a data science team won’t know how a project will turn out until it’s well underway. The data might be missing, there might not be a signal in the data, or the models might just not be practical. Sometimes leaders have to commit their data science teams to doing work before it’s even well-defined.

Above all, data science teams are constantly being given more tasks to work on and last-minute, must-have deliverables often well beyond their bandwidth to handle. Those issues only scratch the surface.

This report is a handguide for thinking about the problems data science leaders face when running a team. It’s a reference to help think through the current challenges of a team or to be proactive about future scenarios. It’s also a guide for people who have not yet had the opportunity to lead a team but want a head start for when they might do so in the future.

In this report, you will learn:

• Who should be on a data science team
• Managing the workflow of the team so that the many tasks are handled effectively
• The technical infrastructure decisions a data science leader must think through
• How to help the data scientists deliver value
• And more