29. Cameron Davidson-Pillon - Data science at Shopify
Towards Data Science
04/15/20
•40m
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If you want to know where data science is heading, it helps to know where it’s been. Very few people have that kind of historical perspective, and even fewer combine it with an understanding of cutting-edge tooling that hints at the direction the field might be taking in the future.
Luckily for us, one of them is Cameron Davidson-Pillon, the former Director of Data Science at Shopify. Cameron has been knee-deep in data science and estimation theory since 2012, when the space was still coming into its own. He’s got a great high-level perspective not only on technical issues but also on hiring and team-building, and he was kind enough to join us for today’s episode of the Towards Data Science podcast.
Previous Episode
28. Emily Robinson - Building a Career in Data Science
April 7, 2020
•43m
It’s easy to think of data science as a purely technical discipline: after all, it exists at the intersection of a number of genuinely technical topics, from statistics to programming to machine learning.
But there’s much more to data science and analytics than solving technical problems — and there’s much more to the data science job search than coding challenges and Kaggle competitions as well. Landing a job or a promotion as a data scientist calls on a ton of career skills and soft skills that many people don’t spend nearly enough time honing.
On this episode of the podcast, I spoke with Emily Robinson, an experienced data scientist and blogger with a pedigree that includes Etsy and DataCamp, about career-building strategies. Emily’s got a lot to say about the topic, particularly since she just finished authoring a book entitled “Build a Career in Data Science” with her co-author Jacqueline Nolis. The book explores a lot of great, practical strategies for moving data science careers forward, many of which we discussed during our conversation.
Next Episode
30. Interviewing the Medium data science team
April 22, 2020
•43m
Revenues drop unexpectedly, and management pulls aside the data science team into a room. The team is given its marching orders: “your job,” they’re told, “is to find out what the hell is going on with our purchase orders.”
That’s a very open-ended question, of course, because revenues and signups could drop for any number of reasons. Prices may have increased. A new user interface might be confusing potential customers. Seasonality effects might have to be considered. The source of the problem could be, well, anything.
That’s often the position data scientists find themselves in: rather than having a clear A/B test to analyze, they frequently are in the business of combing through user funnels to ensure that each stage is working as expected.
It takes a very detail-oriented and business-savvy team to pull off an investigation with that broad a scope, but that’s exactly what Medium has: a group of product-minded data scientists dedicated to investigating anomalies and identifying growth opportunities hidden in heaps of user data. They were kind enough to chat with me and talk about how Medium does data science for this episode of the Towards Data Science podcast.
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