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Building a data team at a mid-stage startup: a short story · Erik Bernhardsson

erikbern.com · 4,840 words · saved by 1 readers

The backdrop is: you have been brought in to grow a tiny data team (~4 people) at a mid-stage startup (~$10M annual revenue), although this story could take place at many different types of companies. 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 th

Building a data team at a mid-stage startup: a short story 2021-07-07 I guess I should really call this a parable. The backdrop is: you have been brought in to grow a tiny data team ( 4 people) at a mid-stage startup ( $10M annual revenue), although this story could take place at many different types of companies. 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. July 1: morning It's your first day as h

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