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Navigating your Data Science Career – From IC to Leader

The role of a data scientist has evolved into a complex potpourri of statistics, ML/AI, software engineering, data engineering, applied product development, product evangelization and sales, and so on. Consequently the role of AI leaders and managers requires a great nuance and balance in terms of technical aptitude as well as great people leadership skills. The progression of an Individual Contributor (IC) Data Scientist can grow in multitudes of directions, and if it’s not in the IC track,  it’s key that current leaders nurture the smart engineers and scientists into strategic AI product and/ or people leaders. 

My next guest on the Product Bulb Podcast is one such AI leader who transitioned from an IC role to leading multiple data teams at 2U – Luigi Patruno. I initially knew  Luigi through his work on ML in Production, where his AWS Sagemaker tutorial was probably the only real end-to-end tutorial back in 2018/19 other than AWS’s own documentation. It was a bookmark that I kept coming back to for reference. And now, it was great to chat with him again, about his journey and insights on ML leadership, AI team building strategies and how to succeed in a data science career – be it as an Individual Contributor, a people leader or a product leader.

We cover topics like Transitioning from Data Science Individual Contributors to Leadership, Consulting Data scientists vs Core product data scientists, Siloed data teams, Building data teams from scratch, Budgeting, Generative AI and so on!

Tune in to Episode 2 of The Product Bulb Podcast on Youtube and Spotify!!