I was on the Building AI Products podcast

The inimitable Raph Lee interviewed me on the second episode of his podcast, Building AI Products. I love this podcast concept because it's about the nitty-gritty technical details of getting these products out the door—a framing I don't see talked about nearly enough.

This is the first time I've been interviewed about running teams and doing data work. It was really fun! I'd love to do more of these.

Listener Feedback

My favorite part has been hearing from listeners, so if you got something out of it, I'd love to hear from you! So far I've heard:

• a lot of followup questions about using the Shape Up framework to structure and prioritize work
• "it's really interesting how you use design thinking to hone the scope of machine learning products. I'm user researcher and didn't realize my skills could be used that way."
• "I will literally use this tomorrow!!" and then when I followed up a couple days later: "I showed this to my boss, and we used the questions to guide a stakeholder away from a dashboard they were requesting, but didn't actually need. We built them something better." Add 1 to my running Misguided Dashboard Kill Count, please and thank you 🏆

Show Notes

Sasha is one of those wonderful high-IQ, high-EQ, left-right-brained people who's both super technical and a great people manager.

At Warby Parker, she ran a centralized team that did statistical modeling, BI training and analyst support, and machine learning.

In this episode, we discuss:

👓 Shape Up, a framework for shipping in six-week cycles that turns out to be perfect for data science teams

👓 Powerful questions to build the right thing for stakeholders, especially stakeholders who don't "speak data"

👓 Why everyone asks for a dashboard, but nobody actually needs one

👓 How a centralized team of data scientists can work with data analysts embedded in vertical business teams

Show links

- Find Sasha's coaching practice here
- Basecamp's book on the Shape Up framework, by Ryan Singer (free to read online)
- Sasha's consulting company, Polynumeral, published a book called Thinking with Data (by Max Shron) that talks more about working with stakeholders and scoping projects

Listen to the show

If you found it useful and want to share, you can boost Raph's post on LinkedIn if you like.

Thanks for listening!