It is not about fancy ML. Assess what the biggest problem is. Solve 20% of it. The rest will follow.
In 2022, I had been working at Skyscanner for a couple of years and as a manager around 4. I got a sudden opportunity of moving completely outside of my domain knowledge and tasked with building a marketing data science team from scratch. This was no small ask, as Data Science hadn’t had a team working under the marketing umbrella before. This came with a few daunting implications for me:
- Who are the main decision makers and how do I establish a good working relationship with them?
- Where do I even start? What could the first projects be?
- I don’t have a team, so how do I add value to influence more headcount growth?
- I have no marketing domain knowledge, what can I do to accelerate this learning?
In this blog, I want to share with you what did I do over the course of 2 years to build a data science team in marketing from only myself to a team of myself + 6 data scientists.
At the time the request of building a marketing data science team came, our Data Science discipline at Skyscanner had 4 main teams focusing on (1) recommendations…