10 reasons your customers/stakeholders don’t make time for your data science and analytics initiatives

If you’re running an internal enterprise data science or analytics team, and you can’t get the time of your stakeholders and business partners “to help you help them,” there’s probably a reason – or two – or three. These are some of the cold hard facts that maybe they won’t tell you–but maybe they are … Read more

How Adopting a Product Mindset Can Improve the UX and ROI of Your Data Science and Analytics Work

A variety of colored pencils pointing up , lined up in a row to look like a bar chart.

The work of enterprise data science and analytics teams is often experienced in software—whether it be via custom apps, dashboards, or BI tools. As such, data teams are software teams—but many of them do not build solutions the way the best software product teams do. What can data leaders learn—and steal—from software teams who put … Read more

Why you need to stop saying yes when they ask, “can you build us a dashboard that shows this data?”

Yes We Can written in scrabble pieces.

If there’s one thing I see a lot of in my work, it’s dashboards.  I don’t talk about dashboards a ton because a dashboard alone is neither a data product nor an experience. It is an output and artifact that is part of a user or stakeholder’s overall experience, typically in our case, in some decision making context. … Read more

My Top 10 Predictions for Data Product Leaders in 2022

Colorful sprinkle-covered Doughnuts up close

Below are ten 2022 predictions for data product leaders and organizations trying to leverage ML and analytics in their software, tools, apps, and services. From the lens of a consulting product designer. Yea, you head that one right. If that PhD in physics, statistics, math or engineering in you is already making you cringe, you may depart this … Read more

Why software teams need to look beyond “user-centered” when referring to ML or AI-driven data products

As a designer, I used to say “user-centered”—a lot. It’s terminology we now hear from non-designers now, people like many of you. That’s a good thing. But, I want you and your teams to think bigger. For me, that “user-centered” descriptor is missing something about design, and particularly so if you are working on ML/AI systems. … Read more