The art and science of data science

Everyone is talking about AI (including us, last week). What should probably get more discussion is the importance of the data you dump in the AI hopper. Of course, data is valuable even when you don’t use it to fuel AI but use it for more mundane uses like, oh I don’t know, seeing how well your product is performing. With that in mind, this week we look at the world of data science and its importance to your product management efforts.

Meanwhile, in product news, one company wants you get money when AI uses your data, another company want to charge you to share data, a third company wants you to use a design system, and the federal government really doesn’t want you to use a fourth company’s product.

Analytics and data science fundamentals for product managers. Data science and analytics play a very important role in Product Management, it helps product managers to make informed decisions, refine product performance, and create more effective strategies. Jayendra More provides an overview of analytics and data science fundamentals for product managers .

Leveraging data science in product management: The Rise of Data Product Managers. In today's digital era, data plays a big role in shaping successful products. As products become more sophisticated and data-driven, you’ve probably seen the value of harnessing data to make informed decisions, enhance existing products, and create entirely new ones. Vishal Ranjan Pandey explores the synergy between data science and product management and sheds light on the pivotal role data product managers play in ensuring product success.

Data products and their management. There are two categories of data operations where product managers sit in the data science realm. One is managing data and the potential of data to provide data as a service. The second is to manage services to capture, transform, and store data to use it to create models that produce valuable information. Chitransha Seth shares lessons learned from building data services and a SaaS platform that manages data as a service .

Data science: The driving force in modern product management and development. Data science emerges as the beacon guiding companies toward ground breaking product advancements in an age where digital innovation is paramount. Andrii Shchur explores the journey of a transformative data science project aimed at refining and elevating a product . With data analytics, predictive modeling, and machine learning, businesses help you anticipate market trends, tailor user experiences, and streamline development workflows with unprecedented precision. Andrii shows how data science enhances product features and functionality and optimizes management strategies to keep pace with evolving consumer expectations and technological advancements.

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This week’s Video

Why more data can actually lead to worse decisions. Despite the increasing availability of data, people seem to struggle to make the right decisions. The human element is easy to ignore when you’re talking about AI, machine learning, or the latest tool. However, this is where things can easily fall apart for teams that are striving to be data driven. We assume that more data will lead to more confidence. The more we know, the better, right? In theory, yes, but in practice, this doesn’t seem to work that way.

In this discussion, Mike Belsito digs in on this challenge with Ruben Ugarte , Principal at Practico Analytics.

This video, and many more just like it, are available on our Member Hub. If you don’t have access to the Member Hub already, you can join the community today for free .

Product Management News: Week of April 22, 2024

Data is the new oil, and a startup wants to help you sell your own. From Big Tech firms to startups, AI makers are licensing e-books, images, videos, audio and more from data brokers, all in the pursuit of training up more capable (and more legally defensible) AI-powered products. Shutterstock has deals with Meta, Google, Amazon and Apple to supply millions of images for model training, while OpenAI has signed agreements with several news organizations to train its models on news archives. Many times, the individual creators and owners of that data haven't seen a dime of the cash changing hands. A startup called Vana wants to change that .

Pay to Post is now a thing. X is planning to charge new users a small fee to enable posting on the social network and to curb the bot problem. Musk said charging a small fee to new accounts was the “only way” to stop the “onslaught of bots.” Depending on how serious bot makers are to keep pushing out their misinformation, the change might have the unintended consequence of slowing new users that Musk actually wants to join the platform.

Figma wants your organization to use its design system more. Design systems are core to Figma. Over the past few years, they’ve watched their community grow and the design systems they create become more powerful, flexible, and sophisticated. But with power and sophistication comes complexity, and they’ve found that one of the biggest challenges facing design systems managers today is gaining organizational adoption. To help design system managers encourage adoption, Figma launched several features designed to drive design system adoption across your team .

We really mean it this time. The US House of Representatives passed another divest-or ban TikTok bill as part of a foreign aid package. That forced the Senate to stop kicking the TikTok can down the road. They approved the measure and President Biden signed it. That means China-based parent company ByteDance has to divest TikTok in nine months to a year in order to avoid an effective ban in the US.

Resources and news curated by Kent J McDonald