4 Capabilities for leading people

 

This chapter covers

  • Delegating projects while ensuring result consistency across projects
  • Making buy-versus-build recommendations
  • Building powerful teams and influencing partners to increase their impact
  • Managing up to your manager
  • Broadening and deepening your business understanding

As a DS manager, your primary responsibility is to nurture your team to produce business impact. Your capabilities are reflected in your ability to deliver results, promote a portfolio of technical expertise in your team, and increase your team’s potential to capture additional opportunities. Many of these responsibilities also apply to a staff data scientist.

The primary technology for a DS manager is the delegation process. Effective delegation maximizes the productivity of the team. As a manager or staff data scientist, you can also manage consistency across models and projects and make recommendations for build-versus-buy decisions to improve team productivity. We discuss these technology concerns in section 4.1.

To have a powerful team to delegate to, you can build and nurture a team of talent under your supervision. As manager or staff data scientist, influencing partner teams and coordinating on producing more impact together can help your team members be more successful. Aligning your team’s effort with senior executives’ goals and managing up is also crucial for the successful execution of company initiatives. We discuss these in section 4.2.

4.1 Technology: Tools and skills

4.1.1 Delegating projects effectively

4.1.2 Managing for consistency across models and projects

4.1.3 Making build-versus-buy recommendations

4.2 Execution: Best practices

4.2.1 Building powerful teams under your supervision

4.2.2 Influencing partner teams to increase impact

4.2.3 Managing up to your manager

4.3.1 Broadening knowledge to multiple technical and business domains