Hire a Data Scientist too early…

and you’ll both regret it.

Hire these roles first:

1. Software Engineers – build core app, data model, data flow, non-ML features
2. Product Manager – know the customer, target the right problems
3. Data Analyst – answer important questions, quantify value, prototype analytics

Then hire:

4. Data Scientist – predict, classify, recommend
5. Data Engineer – support productization, accelerate data feature delivery

Why?
* Engineering can address >95% of early product features without Data Science
* Product helps you find/keep product market fit
* Analysts accelerate every team in the company (not joking) and lay the ground work for great data science

Hiring a data scientist too soon isn’t fair to you or them.

You’ll both be spinning your wheels.

Articles for Startup Product Leaders
Get 1 concise, actionable tip each week

Subscribe

Don’t take my word for it…

“Your posts are consistently hitting the nail on the head. Appreciate the experience.”

“Please keep sharing your experiences – a lot of your recent posts had great nuggets of value”

“You will be hard-pressed to find a smarter, more caring, empathetic executive.”

“Josh is a stellar Product professional. Out of all the books on his desk, I expected one to be authored by him.”