Over the last 8 years of buiding Data Science and Machine learning teams, i’ve been compiling a framework to think about growth and structure of data scientists. I call it the Data Science Competency Framework, and it contains the following elements:

• A set of competencies that can be used to think about and evaluate growth and progress of Data Scientists, Machine Learning Engineers and Data Engineers.
• A career ladder for your Data Team.
• A scorecard to assign numerical …

Data Services or Data Products? The Dilemma that shouldn’t be

Data teams represent an organizational transformation for most companies, some of which hire data scientists, data engineers, and machine learning engineers. But which problems do data folk solve? Most of them take care of urgent business requests, all day, every day. Do they work with engineering? Do they focus on R&D until they build something truly valuable? If this is you (or your team), are you …

This post was originally published as a story in Plato

Problem

I had a senior data engineer that started to become unmotivated and unhappy in his job. I began looking deeper to understand the source of his distress and I came to learn that he felt like he was hitting the perceived ceiling of growth in our company. He was a valuable asset to us, thus, I needed to strategize ways in which he could continue growing with our organization so that he did not feel bored nor like …