Podcasts Technology Towards Data Science 5. Rocio Ng - Data science and product management at LinkedIn

5. Rocio Ng - Data science and product management at LinkedIn

Published: Sept. 19, 2019, 3:56 p.m.

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Most software development roles are pretty straightforward: someone tells you what to build (usually a product manager), and you build it. What\\u2019s interesting about data science is that although it\\u2019s a software role, it doesn\\u2019t quite follow this rule.

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That\\u2019s because data scientists are often the only people who can understand the practical business consequences of their work. There\\u2019s only one person on the team who can answer questions like, \\u201cWhat does the variance in our cluster analysis tell us about user preferences?\\u201d and \\u201c What are the business consequences of our model\\u2019s ROC score?\\u201d, and that person is the data scientist. In that sense, data scientists have a very important responsibility not to leave any insights on the table, and to bring business instincts to bare even when they\\u2019re dealing with deeply technical problems.

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For today\\u2019s episode, we spoke with Rocio Ng, a data scientist at LinkedIn, about the need for strong partnerships between data scientists and product managers, and the day-to-day dynamic between those roles at LinkedIn. Along the way, we also talked about one of the most common mistakes that early career data scientists make: focusing too much on that first role.

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