You can manage data scientists like you manage software developers.

I made the mistake of assigning story points on tasks for data scientists to work on. That didn’t work at all. Data scientists do not work well in those capacities. They are better suited in applying themselves to experiments. That means setting up a hypothesis and figuring out if it is true or false.

Data scientists don’t need to be a business domain expert.

Most data scientists have PhDs. They are good at working with data. Yet, that’s not enough for most businesses to take advantage of their skills. To get deep insight, data scientists need to understand what those data mean for the business.

Does tweaking some data set increase revenue? Does doing the same decrease sales?

At the end of the day, you will need a professional that can: apply intuition, pay attention to every aspect of your data set and explain everything to business stakeholders.

That’s a data scientist.

Data scientists are only needed in some businesses.

Our world is becoming ever more digital. If you don’t have an online presence, sooner or later you could risk becoming obsolete. We have so much data today, generated by both humans and machines. You need someone to look at and manage everything data-related. In fact, most progressive businesses now have a data department.

Are you ready to have a data scientist on your team?