|
Strong engineering talent is the bedrock of modern technology companies. Software engineers, in particular, are in high demand given their expertise and skills. At the same time, there is a much greater supply of software companies and startups, all of which are jostling to hire top engineers. Given this market reality, retention of top engineering talent is imperative for a company to grow and innovate in the short as well as the long term.
Retaining employees is critical for numerous reasons. It helps a company retain experience not only in terms of employees’ domain expertise and skills, but also organizational knowledge of products, processes, people, and culture. Strong employee retention rates (>90%) ensure a long-term foundation for success and enhances team morale as well as trust in the company. A stable engineering team is in a better position to both build and ship innovative products and establish a reputation in the market that helps attract top-quality talent. The corporate incentive of maintaining high standards of employee hiring and retention is also related to the costs of employee churn. Turnover costs companies in the US $1 trillion USD a year with an annual turnover rate of more than twenty-six percent. The cost of replacing talent is often as high as two times their annual salary. This is a tremendous expense that can be averted through better company policies and culture. The onus is typically on the human resources (HR) team to develop more employee-friendly practices and promote higher engagement and work–life balance. However, in practice, most HR teams are deferential to the company leadership and that is where the buck stops. Leaders and managers have a fundamental responsibility to retain the employees on their team, as more often than not, employees do not leave the company per se, but the line manager. I will discuss best practices and strategies to improve retention, which ought to be a consistent effort across the entire employee lifecycle--from recruiting to onboarding through regular milestones during an employee’s tenure. Start at the Start More often than not, managers do not invest in onboarding preparation and processes out of laziness and indifference. Good employee retention practice starts at the very beginning, i.e., at the time of hiring. Hiring talent through a structured, transparent, fair, and meritocratic interviewing process that allows the candidate to understand their particular role and responsibilities, the company’s diversity and inclusion practices, and the larger mission of the company sets an important tone for future employees. Hiring the right people who are a good culture fit increases the likelihood of greater engagement and longer tenure at the company. Hiring managers should not hire for the sake of hiring. They should put considerable thought into each new hire and how that hire might fit in on their team. Apart from hiring, managers have other important considerations, including:
In the first few months, the new hires, the hiring team, and company are in a “dating” phase, evaluating each other and gathering evidence on whether to commit to a longer-term relationship. Most new employees make up their mind to stay or leave within the first six months. A third of new hires who quit said they had barely any onboarding or none at all. The importance of a new employee’s first impressions on the joining date, the first week, the first month, and the first quarter cannot be overemphasized. Great onboarding starts before the new hire’s join date, ensuring all necessary preparation is handled, like paperwork. Orientation programs on the join day are essential to introduce the company and expand on its mission, values, and culture beyond what the employee might have learned during the interviews. Minor things like having the team know in advance about a new team member’s join date, and readying the desk, equipment, access, and logins are tell-tale signs of how much thought and effort the hiring team has invested in onboarding. Fellow teammates also make a significant impact, whether they are welcoming and drop in to say “hi” or stop by for a quick chat to get to know the hire better, or take the new employee out for lunch with the whole team. Onboarding should not end on day one but continue in various forms. Some examples include:
A successful onboarding strategy should enable the employee to know their first project, the expectations, associated milestones, and how performance evaluation works. Keep It Up! Onboarding should be followed up with regular check-ins by the manager and HR at the one-month, three-month, and six-month mark. These meetings should be treated as an opportunity for the company to assess the new employee’s comfort level on the team and provide feedback as needed. An onboarding mentor or buddy, if not assigned already, should be provided to help the employee find their feet and learn the informal culture and practices. The manager should set up the employee for success by providing low-hanging projects that are quick to deliver and help the new hire understand the process of building and deploying a new feature using the company’s internal engineering tools and systems. With quick wins, new hires are able to build trust within the organization and gain more confidence to do excellent work. As time goes on, the role of the hiring manager becomes more prominent in coordinating regular 1-on-1 meetings, providing the new hire clear work guidelines, as well as challenging and stimulating projects. Apart from work, an introduction to the organizational setup and culture, as well as social interaction within and beyond the team is also crucial. As the new employee ramps up, it is important to give constructive feedback so that the employee can improve. Where a new employee delivers positive impact in the early days itself, the manager should highlight their work within the team and organization, and motivate the employee to continue to perform well. In addition to core engineering work, employees feel more connected when a company actively invests in their learning and development. Cross-functional training programs that involve employees across different teams foster deeper collaboration and a stronger sense of connection within the various parts of the company. Investment in employees’ upskilling and education via partnership with external learning platforms or vendors also generates a positive culture of instilling curiosity and learning. Learning new skills energizes the employees and provides them opportunities to grow and develop. They can then apply the newly learned knowledge and skills to pertinent business problems. It creates a virtuous culture that yields overall positive outcomes for the employee and employer alike, and positively influences the long-term retention rates. New employees generally feel the need to be positively engaged. A powerful mission statement can sometimes convert naysayers faster and generate a company-wide sense of being part of something impactful. This fosters deeper engagement, loyalty, and trust in the company and helps employees embrace company values, resulting in better employee retention rates. Frequent town hall meetings from the leadership enable a new hire to understand the organization as a coherent whole and their particular role in furthering the company’s mission. Listen to Feedback The diverse organizational efforts to onboard, engage, and enhance new employees’ perception of the company are bound to fail if the organization does not seek and act on any feedback shared by the new hires. Companies ought to create an internal culture of open communication whereby they seek feedback from employees via surveys, meetings, and town halls, and showcase transparent efforts in implementing employees’ suggestions and feedback. Regular 1-on-1 meetings with managers should be treated as an opportunity to gather feedback and offer the employee insights into whether and how the company is taking action on that feedback. However, in spite of organizational efforts to improve employee satisfaction and wellbeing, some attrition is inevitable. Attrition rates of more than ten percent is a cause for concern, however, especially when top-performing employees leave the company. Exit interviews are typically conducted by HR and hiring managers, but in practice these are largely farcical as the employees hardly share their honest opinions and have lost trust that the company can take care of their career interests and development. Companies can implement processes that bring greater transparency around employee decisions related to hiring, promotion, and exit. These processes will also hold HR and managers to greater accountability with respect to employee churn, and incentivize them to increase the retention rates in their teams. In past generations, job stability was a paramount aspiration for employees which meant they typically spent all their working lives at the same company. In today’s world, with a plethora of enterprises and new startups, high-performing talent is in greater demand and it is possible to accelerate one’s career growth by frequently job hopping and switching companies. Nowadays, feedback about company processes, culture, compensation, interviews, and so on, is available on a plethora of public platforms including Glassdoor and LinkedIn. Companies are now more proactive in managing their online reputation and act on feedback from the anonymous reviews on such platforms. Conclusion Employees in the post-Covid remote-working world are prone to greater degrees of stress, mental health issues, and burnout, all of which have adverse impacts on their work–life balance. In such extraordinary times, companies face the unique challenge—and opportunity—to develop and promote better employee welfare practices. At one end of the spectrum, there are companies like Amazon. In 2015, The New York Times famously portrayed the company as a “bruising workplace.” Then, in 2021, The New York Times again reported on Amazon for poor workplace practices and systems, prompting a public acknowledgment from the CEO that Amazon needs to do a better job. On the other end of the spectrum, there are companies like Atlassian or Spotify that have made proactive changes in their organizational culture and are being lauded for new practices to promote employee welfare during the pandemic. Companies that adapt to the changing times and demonstrate that they genuinely care for their employees will enjoy better retention rates, lower costs due to frequent rehiring, and long-term employee trust that conveys the company as a beacon of progressive workplace culture and employment practices.
0 Comments
Data science teams are an integral part of early-stage or growth-stage start-ups as midlevel and enterprise companies. A data science team can include a wide range of roles that take care of the end-to-end machine learning lifecycle from project conceptualization to execution, delivery, and monitoring:
The manager of a data science team in an enterprise organization has multiple responsibilities, including the following:
As the data science manager, it’s critical to have a structured, efficient hiring process, especially in a highly competitive job market where the demand outstrips the supply of data science and machine learning talent. A transparent, thoughtful, and open hiring process sends a strong signal to prospective candidates about the intent and culture of both the data science team and the company, and can make your company a stronger choice when the candidates are selecting an offer. In this blog, you’ll learn about key aspects of the process of hiring a top-class data science team. You’ll dive into the process of recruitment, interviewing, and evaluating candidates to learn how to find the ones who can help your business improve its data science capabilities. Benefits of an Efficient Hiring Process Recent events have accelerated organizations’ focus on digital and AI transformation, resulting in a very tight labor market when you’re looking for data sciencedigital skills, like machinelike data science and machine learning, statistics, and programming. A structured, efficient hiring process enables teams to move faster, make better decisions, and ensure a good experience for the candidates. Even if candidates don’t get an offer, a positive experience interacting with the data science and the recruitment teams makes them more likely to share good feedback on platforms like Glassdoor, which might encourage others to interview at the company. Hiring Data Science Teams A good hiring process is a multistep process, and in this section, you’ll look at every step of the process in detail. Building a Funnel for Talent Depending on the size of the data science team, the hiring manager may have to assume the responsibility of reaching out to candidates and building a pipeline of talent. In larger organizations, managers can work with in-house recruiters or even third-party recruitment agencies to source talent. It’s important for the data science managers to clearly convey the requirements for the recruited candidates, such as the number of candidates desired and the profiles of those candidates. Candidate profiles might include things like previous experience, education or certifications, skill set or tech stack, and experience with specific use cases. Using these details, recruiters can then start their marketing, advertising, and outreach campaigns on platforms, like LinkedIn, Glassdoor, Twitter, HackerRank, and LeetCode. In several cases, recruiters may identify candidates who are a strong fit but who may not be on the job market or are not actively looking for new roles. A database of all such candidates ought to be maintained so that recruiters can proactively reach out to them at a more suitable time and reengage the candidates. Another trusted source of identifying good candidates is through employee referrals. An in-house employee referral program that incentivizes current employees to refer candidates from their network is often an effective way to attract the specific types of talent you’re looking for. The data science leader should also publicize their team’s work through channels, like conferences or workshops, company blogs, podcasts, media, and social media. By investing dedicated time and energy in building up the profile of the data science team, it’s more likely that candidates will reach out to your company seeking data science opportunities. When looking for a diverse set of talent, the search an be difficult as data science is a male dominated field. As a result, traditional recruiting paths will continue to reflect this bias. Reaching out and building relationships with groups such as Women in Data Science, can help broad the pipeline of talent you attract. Defining Roles and Responsibilities Good candidates are more likely to apply for roles that have a clear job description, including a list of potential data science use cases, a list of required skills and tech stack, and a summary of the day-to-day work, as well as insights into the interviewing process and time lines. Crafting specific, accurate job descriptions is a critical—if often overlooked—aspect of attracting candidates. The more information and clarity you provide up front, the more likely it is that candidates have sufficient information to decide if it’s a suitable role for them and if they should go ahead with the application or not. If you’re struggling with creating this, you can start with an existing job description template and then customize it in accordance with the needs of the team and company. It's also critical to not over populate a job description with every possible skill or experience you hope a candidate brings. That will narrow your potential applicant pool. Instead focus on those skills and experiences that are absolutely critical. The right candidate will be able to pick up other skills on the job. It can be useful for the job description to include links to any recent publications, blogs, or interviews by members of the data science team. These links provide additional details about the type of work your team does and also offer candidates a glimpse of other team members. Here are some job description templates for the different roles in a data science team: Interviewing process When compared to software engineering interviews, the interview process for data science roles is still very unstructured, and data science candidates are often uncertain about what the interview process involves. The professional position of data scientist has only existed for a little over a decade, and in that time, the role has evolved and transformed, resulting in even newer, more specialized roles, such as data engineer, machine learning engineer, applied scientist, research scientist, and product data scientist. Because of the diversity of roles that could be considered data science, it’s important for a data science manager to customize the interviewing process depending on the specific profile they’re seeking. Data scientists need to have expertise in multiple domains, and one or more second-round interviews can be tailored around these core skills:
Given how tight the job market is for data science talent, it’s important to not over complicate the process. The more steps in the process, the longer it will take and the higher the likelihood you will lose viable candidates to other offers. So be thoughtful in your approach and evaluate it periodically to align with the market. Types of Data Science Interviews Interviews are often a multistep process and can involve multiple steps of assessments. Screening Interviews To save time, one or more screening rounds can be conducted before inviting candidates for second-round interviews. These screening interviews can take place virtually and involve an assessment of essential skills, like programming and machine learning, along with a deep dive into the candidate’s experience, projects, career trajectory, and motivation to join the company. These screening rounds can be conducted by the data science team itself or outsourced to other companies, like HackerRank, HackerEarth, Triplebyte, or Karat. Onsite Interviews Once candidates have passed the screening interviews, the top candidates will be invited to a second interview, either virtually or in person. The data science manager has to take the lead in terms of coordinating with internal interviewers to confirm the schedule for the series of interviews that will assess the candidate’s skills, as described earlier. On the day of the second-round interviews, the hiring manager needs to help the candidate feel welcome and explain how the day will proceed. Some companies like to invite candidates to lunch with other team members, which breaks the ice by allowing the candidate to interact with potential team members in a social setting. Each interview in the series should start by having the interviewer introduce themself and provide a brief summary of the kind of work they do. Depending on the types of interviews and assessments the candidate has already been through, the rest of the interview could focus on the core skill set to be evaluated or other critical considerations. Wherever possible, interviewers should offer the candidate hints if they get stuck and otherwise try to make them feel comfortable with the process. The last five to ten minutes of each interview should be reserved for the candidate to ask questions to the interviewer. This is a critical component of second-round interviews, as the types of questions a candidate asks offer a great deal of information about how carefully they’ve considered the role. Before the candidate leaves, it’s important for the recruiter and hiring manager to touch base with the candidate again, inquire about their interview experience, and share time lines for the final decision. Technical Assessment It is common for there to be some sort of case study or technical assessment to get a better understanding of a candidate’s approach to problem solving, dealing with ambiguity and practical skills. This provides the company with good information about how the candidate may perform in the role It also is an opportunity to show the candidate what type of data and problems they may work on when working for you. Evaluating candidates After the second-round interviews and technical assessment, the hiring manager needs to coordinate a debrief session. In this meeting, every interviewer shares their views based on their experience with the candidate and offers a recommendation if the candidate should be hired or not. After obtaining the feedback from each member of the interview panel, the hiring manager also shares their opinion. If the candidate unanimously receives a strong hire or a strong no-hire signal, then the hiring manager’s decision is simple. However, there may be candidates who perform well in some interviews but not so well in others, and who elicit mixed feedback from the interview panel. In cases like this, the hiring manager has to make a judgment call on whether that particular candidate should be hired or not. In some cases, an offer may be extended if a candidate didn’t do well in one or more interviews but the panel is confident that the candidate can learn and upskill on the job, and is a good fit for the team and the company. If multiple candidates have interviewed for the same role, then a relative assessment of the different candidates should be considered, and the strongest candidate or candidates, depending on the number of roles to be filled, should be considered. While most of the interviews focus on technical data science skills, it’s also important for interviewers to use their time with the candidate to assess soft skills, like communication, clarity of thought, problem-solving ability, business sense, and leadership values. Many large companies place a very strong emphasis on behavioral interviews, and poor performance in this interview can lead to a rejection, even if the candidate did well on the technical assessments. Job Offer After the debrief session, the data science manager needs to make their final decision and share the outcome, along with a compensation budget, with the recruiter. If there’s no recruiter involved, the manager can move directly to making the candidate an offer. It’s important to move quickly when it comes to making and conveying the decision, especially if candidates are interviewing at multiple companies. Being fast and flexible in the hiring process gives companies an edge that candidates appreciate and take into consideration in their decision-making process. Once the offer and details of compensation have been sent to the candidate, it’s essential to close the offer quickly to prevent candidates from using your offer as leverage at other companies. Including a deadline for the offer can sometimes work to the company’s advantage by incentivizing candidates to make their decision faster. If negotiations stretch and the candidate seems to lose interest in the process, the hiring manager should assess whether the candidate is really motivated to be part of the team. Sometimes, it may move things along if the hiring manager steps in and has another brief call with the candidate to help remove any doubts about the type of work and projects. However, additional pressure on the candidates can often work to your disadvantage and may put off a skilled and motivated candidate in whom the company has already invested a lot of time and money. Conclusion In this article, you’ve looked at an overview of the process of hiring a data science team, including the roles and skills you might be hiring for, the interview process, and how to evaluate and make decisions about candidates. In a highly competitive data science job market, having a robust pipeline of talent, and a fast, fair, and structured hiring process can give companies a competitive edge. Published by Domino Data Lab Preview:
Reproducibility is a cornerstone of the scientific method and ensures that tests and experiments can be reproduced by different teams using the same method. In the context of data science, reproducibility means that everything needed to recreate the model and its results such as data, tools, libraries, frameworks, programming languages and operating systems, have been captured, so with little effort the identical results are produced regardless of how much time has passed since the original project. Reproducibility is critical for many aspects of data science including regulatory compliance, auditing, and validation. It also helps data science teams be more productive, collaborate better with nontechnical stakeholders, and promote transparency and trust in machine learning products and services. In this article, you’ll learn about the benefits of reproducible data science and how to ingrain reproducibility in every data science project. You’ll also learn how to cultivate an organizational culture that promotes greater reproducibility, accountability, and scalability. Here is the full article. Published by Colabra Preview:
Effective communication skills are pivotal to success in science. From maximizing productivity at work through efficient teamwork and collaboration to preventing the spread of misinformation during global pandemics like Covid19, the importance of strong communication skills cannot be emphasized enough. However, scientists often struggle to communicate their work clearly for various reasons. Firstly, most academic institutes do not prioritize training scientists in essential soft skills like communication. With negligible organizational or departmental training and little to no feedback from professors and peers, scientists fail to fully appreciate the real-world importance and consequences of poor communication skills. The long scientific training period in the academic ivory tower is spent conversing with fellow scientists, with minimal interaction with non-technical professionals and the general public. Thus, the lingua franca among scientists is predominantly interspersed with jargon, leading to poor communication with non-scientists. This article will describe best practices and frameworks for professional scientists and non-scientists in commercial scientific enterprises to communicate effectively. 👉 Here is the full article Published by Unbox.ai Preview:
Supervised machine learning models are trained using data and their associated labels. For example, to discriminate between a cat and a dog present in an image, the model is fed images of cats or dogs and a corresponding label of “cat” or “dog” for each image. Assigning a category to each data sample is referred to as data labeling. Data labeling is essential to imparting machines with knowledge of the world that is relevant for the particular machine learning use case. Without labels, models do not have any explicit understanding of the information in a given data set. A popular example that demonstrates the value of data labeling is the ImageNet data set. More than a million images were labeled with hundreds of object categories to create this pioneering data set that heralded the deep-learning era. In this article, you’ll learn more about data labeling and its use cases, processes, and best practices. 👉 Here is the full article Published by Transform Preview:
A metric layer is a centralized repository for key business metric. This “layer” sits between an organization’s data storage and compute layer and downstream tools where metric logic lives—like downstream business intelligence tools. A metric layer is a semantic layer where data teams can centrally define and store business metrics (or key performance indicators) in code. It then becomes a source of truth for metric—which means people who analyze data in downstream tools like Hex, Mode, or Tableau will all be working with the same metric logic in their analyses. The metric layer is a relatively new concept in the modern data stack, mainly because until recently, it was only available to companies with large or sophisticated data teams. Now it is more readily available to all organizations with metric platforms like Transform. In this article, you’ll learn what a metric layer is, how to use your data warehouse as a data source for the metric layer, and how to get value from this central metric repository by consuming metrics in downstream tools. 👉 Here is the full article Published by StatusHero Preview:
Teams are the building blocks of successful organizations. The success of modern technology companies is driven to a large extent by their engineering and product teams. It is crucial for new engineering and product team leaders to maximize the productivity of their respective teams while ensuring a strong sense of team spirit, motivation, and alignment to the larger mission of the company, as well as fostering an inclusive and open culture that is collaborative, meritocratic, and respectful of each team member. Effective team development and management is therefore critical for engineering and product leaders, and ensuring robust team development at scale remains a big challenge in the face of changing work conditions. Despite the importance of team building and development, not many leaders are trained to succeed and hone their leadership skills. In many cases, individual contributors who progress or transition to the managerial track may not have the aptitude for developing teams nor have the necessary experience or training in this vital aspect of their new role. Although team development is more an art than a science, this topic has received significant interest from the industry as well as academia, leading to structured team development theories and strategies. In this article, you’ll explore a list of curated tips for engineering and product leaders to better manage the development of your teams and accelerate your learning journey on the leadership track. This particular set of tips focuses on building team cohesion, facilitating the five stages of team development, and providing structures for effective teamwork and communication that foster an open and collaborative team culture. 👉 Here is the full article Preview:
"Data democratization" has become a buzzword for a reason. Modern organizations rely extensively on data to make informed decisions about their customers, products, strategy, and to assess the health of the business. But even with an abundance of data, if your business can’t access or leverage this data to make decisions, it’s not useful. To that end, data democratization, or the process of making data accessible to everyone, is quintessential to data-driven organizations. Providing data access to everyone also implies that there are few if any roadblocks or gatekeepers who control this access. When stakeholders from different departments—like sales, marketing, operations, and finance—are permitted and incentivized to use this data to better understand and improve their business function, the whole organization benefits. Successful data democratization requires constant effort and discipline. It’s founded on an organization-wide cultural shift that embraces a data-first approach and empowers every stakeholder to comfortably use data and make better data-driven decisions. As Transform co-founder James Mayfield put it, organizations should think about "democratizing insights, not data." In this article, I will provide a detailed overview of data democratization, why organizations should invest in it, and how to actually implement it in practice. 👉 Here is the full article Preview:
Data governance is a fundamental pillar of modern digital businesses. It refers to a framework of processes and guidelines that companies use to ensure all enterprise data assets are managed and utilized appropriately. Even if an organization has large investments in data infrastructure and teams, without a structured data governance framework, organizations will struggle to harness the full value of their data. A strong framework provides a clear set of guidelines for all employees who access and consume data in downstream applications. It also contributes to greater trust in the authenticity and quality of data and allows data stakeholders to focus on core data tasks instead of worrying about whether the data was created, processed, stored accurately, and in compliance with national or domain-related legislations like GDPR, HIPAA, CCPA, and data localization laws. Given recent data breaches, the importance of a structured data governance framework cannot be emphasized enough. In this article, you’ll learn how to ensure data quality through better data governance mechanisms, leading to an increase in data informed decision-making. You’ll also learn how a clear data governance framework contributes to improved data quality and value creation across the entire organization. 👉 Here is the full article Preview:
Data drift is a common problem for production machine learning systems. It occurs when the statistical characteristics of the training (source) and test (target) data begin to differ significantly. As illustrated in the image below, the orange curve depicting the original data distribution shifts to the purple curve, representing a change in statistical properties like the mean and variance. Understanding data drift is fundamental to maintaining the predictive power of your production machine learning systems. For instance, a data science team may have started working on a machine learning use case in 2019, using training data from 2018, but by the time the model is ready to go into production, it’s 2020. There could be a huge change in the distribution between the source data from 2018 and the live data coming from 2020. Any time a machine learning model is ready to be shipped, it needs to be rigorously tested on live data. It’s critical that you detect data drift before deploying a model to production. In this article, I’ll illustrate the various types of data drift and how data drift impacts model performance along with several examples. I’ll also address data labeling, one of the popular ways to tackle data drift, and how to perform data labeling efficiently. 👉 Here is the full article Published by Neptune.ai Preview:
Only 10% of AI/ML projects have created positive financial impact according to a recent survey of 3,000 executives. Given these odds, it seems that building a profit generating ML project requires a lot of work across the entire organization, from planning to production. In this article, I’ll share best practices for businesses to ensure that their investments in Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence are actually profitable, and create significant value for the entire organization. 👉 Here is the full article Published by Neptune.ai Preview:
In this article, I have documented the best practices and approaches to build a productive Machine Learning team that creates positive business impact and generates economic value within corporate entities, be it startup or enterprise. If you do Machine Learning, either as an individual contributor or team manager, I’ll help you understand your current team structure and how to improve internal processes, systems and culture. We’ll explore how to build truly disruptive ML teams that drive successful outcomes. 👉 Here is the full article Published in BecomingHuman.ai tldr: Poor processes and culture can derail the success of many an exceptional AI team In part 1, I introduced a four-pronged framework for analysing the principal factors underlying the failure of corporate AI projects:
In the second part of the blog series, I will focus on core aspects of organizational processes and culture that companies should inculcate to ensure that their AI teams are successful and deliver significant business impact.  Figure 1. The Facade Culture (source: Dilbert.com) Culture Organizational culture is the foundation on which a company is built and shapes its future outcomes related to commercial impact and success, hiring and retention, as well as the spirit of innovation and creativity. Whilst organizational behaviour and culture have been studied for decades, it needs to be relooked in the context of new-age tech startups and enterprises. The success of such cutting-edge AI-first companies is highly correlated with the scale of innovation through new products and technology, which necessitates an open and progressive work culture. Typically, new startups on the block, especially those building a core AI product or service, are quick to adopt and foster a culture that promotes creativity, rapid experimentation and calculated risk-taking. Being lean and not burdened by any legacy, most tech startups are quick to shape the company culture in the image of the founders’ vision and philosophy (for better or worse). However, the number of tech companies that have become infamous for the lack of an inclusive and meritocratic culture are far too many. There are innumerable examples, from prominent tech startups like Theranos, Uber to big tech companies like Google and Facebook, where an open and progressive culture has at times taken a back seat. However, with the increasing focus on sustainability, diversity and inclusion, and ESG including better corporate governance, it is imperative for tech companies to improve organizational culture and not erode employee, consumer or shareholder trust or face real risks to the business from financial as well as regulatory authorities as recently experienced by BlackRock and Deliveroo. Here is a ready reckoner of some of the ways AI companies tend to lose sight of culture:
 Figure 2. How to scope AI projects (source: DeepLearning.ai) Process There are several processes that are integral for ensuring a successful AI outcome across the entire lifecycle from conception to production. However, from first-principles, the primary process that needs to be streamlined and managed well is identifying the right use cases for AI that have the potential to create significant commercial impact. In this blog, I will focus only on this particular aspect and expound on the other processes in separate blogs. What can go wrong in identifying the right set of AI use cases?
So, having listed a variety of issues that can go wrong in identifying an AI use case, how should one ideally go about scoping AI projects systematically? As per Figure 2, the strategy to scope an AI use case involves 5 steps: from identifying a business problem to brainstorming AI solutions to assessing feasibility and value to determining milestones and finally budgeting for resources. The scoping process starts with a careful dissection of business, not AI problems, that need to be solved for creating commercial value. As discussed above, if not done right, the rest of the AI journey in an organization is bound to fail. Secondly, it is important to brainstorm potential AI solutions across AI, engineering and product teams to shortlist a set of approaches and techniques that are practically feasible instead of going with the latest or most sophisticated AI model or algorithm. Thirdly, AI teams should assess the feasibility of shortlisted methods by creating a quick prototype, validating the approach based on literature survey or discussions with domain experts within the company or partner with external collaborators accordingly. If a particular method does not appear to be feasible, then teams should consider the alternative approaches until they are ruled out. Once the initial efforts have validated the use case, its feasibility and potential approaches, it is critical to define key business metrics, KPIs, acceptance or success criteria. These are not composed of the typical AI model metrics like precision, accuracy of F-1 score, but KPIs need to be defined that are directly correlated with the impact of the AI models on business goals e.g. retention, NPS, customer satisfaction amongst others. The final step involves program management of the entire project from allocating time, bandwidth of individual contributors in the AI as well as partner teams, budget for collecting or labeling data, hiring data scientists or buying software or infrastructure to setup and streamline the entire AI lifecycle. Tldr part 2:
Before you head out to build AI, first ask what are the business problems that are big enough and suitable for an AI-based solution? What business metrics and objectives ought to be targeted? Scope out the problem systematically to ensure the best chance of success. Build on the initial successes of AI and foster a meritocratic and open culture of innovation and cross-functional collaboration to build AI that solves a variety of business use cases. Published in BecomingHuman.ai Tldr: Corporate AI failures can be ascribed to poor Intuition, Process, Systems, People The promise of AI is real. We are at the crossroads of the next industrial revolution where AI is automating industrial processes and technologies that were hitherto considered state-of-the-art. AI is expected to create global commercial value of nearly USD 13 Trillion by 2030 (McKinsey Global Institute). Given the immense commercial value that AI can unlock, it is no surprise that businesses of all kinds and sizes have jumped on the AI bandwagon and are repositioning themselves as ‘AI-first’ or ‘AI-enabled.  Source: Dilbert (https://dilbert.com) However, the groundbreaking progress and transformation that AI has brought across industry belies the stark reality of an increasing number of failed AI projects, products and companies (e.g. IBM Watson, and many more).
How can startups and large enterprises battle these tough odds to drive innovation and digital transformation across the organization? In this blog, I will examine from first principles common themes that typically underlie failed AI projects in corporations, and questions business leaders and teams should address when embarking on AI projects. I have classified these under four broad areas and will tackle each of these themes individually in future blog posts:
Part 1: Intuition (Why) Commercial AI projects often fail due to a lack of organizational understanding of the utility of AI vis-a-vis the business problem(s) to be solved. More often than not, throwing a complex AI-based solution at a problem is not the right approach, where a simpler analytical or rule-based solution is sufficient to have things up and running. It is therefore paramount to decode the business problem first and ask whether an AI approach is the only and best way forward. Unlike software engineering projects, the fundamental unit of AI is not lines of code, but code and data. In an enterprise, data typically belongs to a particular business domain, and is generated by the interaction of customers with specific business products or services. Here, a customer-centric approach is critical to understand the context in which this data is generated so that AI models may be developed to predict or influence user behavior to meet well-defined business objectives with clear success criteria. Wherever possible, the data scientists should themselves use and experiment with their company’s products/services by donning a ‘customer’s hat’ to decode the customer mindset. It’s hard to understand the nuances of training data if you don’t intimately understand the customer ‘persona’ to begin with. Data reflects more than just mere numbers. Making sense of data requires a holistic cross-functional understanding from a business, product, customer as well as technical perspective. Typically, these functional roles are played by different teams within a company, necessitating a strong collaborative effort to demystify the business problem, question the existing solutions and come up with new hypotheses, test and prove or disprove these hypotheses quickly via iterative experiments to hone in on a feasible solution and strategy. Here, the importance of domain knowledge or subject matter expertise cannot be stressed enough. It takes years to gain deep domain expertise which enables practitioners to develop better intuition for the business problem and the underlying data to propose feasible solutions or strategies. As data scientists typically lack expertise in business domains, it is imperative they complement their algorithmic data science skills with expert knowledge from those who work closely with the customer and understand the business problem intimately. Tldr (Part 1/4): Ask why is AI needed for your business problem? Is it the only way to solve the problem? And if yes, build and test hypotheses by leveraging the collective organizational knowledge and intuition across cross-functional teams that specialize in data science, business, product, operations. |
Archives
August 2022
Categories
All
Copyright © 2022, Sundeep Teki
All rights reserved. No part of these articles may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author. Disclaimer
This is a personal blog. Any views or opinions represented in this blog are personal and belong solely to the blog owner and do not represent those of people, institutions or organizations that the owner may or may not be associated with in professional or personal capacity, unless explicitly stated. |
RSS Feed