Friday the 13th of March: day one of the Dutch corona lock-down. I was almost out the door to deliver day 4 of a data science product owner training at the University of Amsterdam, but somehow hadn’t connected the dots that the university closings announced the previous evening meant my training was also cancelled. By force of habit,…

It's been a while since my last blog post, but I wanted to update everyone on a project that's been keeping me busy recently.

Last year Pearson Publishing commissioned me to write a book on big data / data science.  They asked me to write it for executive audiences (non-technical), and to make it very practical for business use. Writing the book was quite a task, but it was a great exercise in summarizing the industry experience I'd gathered in my years leading data science teams…

Everyone gets sunk by office politics at some point in their career, but data scientists  are in some ways especially ill-prepared to navigate the unspoken rules and hidden agendas that together form a critical part of the corporate world.  Although some people may actively fuel office politics to gain power, I'll assume that's not the case for most of us. I'd like instead to simply suggest a few basic survival skills, so we can focus as much as possible on…

Target corporation’s massively profitable data science project threw them into the news spotlight a few years back. Their story makes for a valuable case study in bridging data science and business intuition.

After having painstakingly developed a ‘golden-goose’ analytic model that could flag pregnant shoppers based on seemingly normal purchase patterns, Target…