Integrating data science and AI into your product development process

When you know and understand your data

Back in the days when I was a young, highly motivated data mining consultant, I had an assignment at a large pharmaceutical company. I was seated in the IT department, eager to deliver some real value to the research departments. One day it happened: I was told that I would have the chance to talk to the renowned chemists, leader of the ADME department. I prepared myself, created interesting basic machine learning models as a starting point. In order to do that I also visualized the data in a scatterplot. Then the day arrived and I sat together with this extremely experienced and successful research expert. I wanted to quickly show him which data I had loaded and showed the scatterplot. And this totally caught him. We sat for two hours where he directed me exactly which data to show, which dimensions to combine, let me highlight and inspect certain data points. When he left he had a list of molecules he wanted his team to look at. And he told me: “I have never seen my data like this before”. That experience deeply impressed me and shaped my position towards data science until today. He was not interested in complicated and advanced machine learning algorithms. For him it was enough to look at the data. Because he knew and totally understood his data.

As outlined in my previous post, there are two modes in product management (one for operating a product and one for developing a new one). In this post I will present some principle for the innovation mode.