Susan Holcomb - Nontechnical career skills for data scientists

It’s easy to think of data science as a technical discipline, but in practice, things don’t really work out that way. If you’re going to be a successful data scientist, people will need to believe that you can add value in order to hire you, people will need to believe in your pet project in order to endorse it within your company, and people will need to make decisions based on the insights you pull out of your data.

Although it’s easy to forget about the human element, managing it is one of the most useful skills you can develop if you want to climb the data science ladder, and land that first job, or that promotion you’re after. And that’s exactly why we sat down with Susan Holcomb, the former Head of Data at Pebble, the world’s first smartwatch company.

When Pebble first hired her, Susan was fresh out of grad school in physics, and had never led a team, or interacted with startup executives. As the company grew, she had to figure out how to get Pebble’s leadership to support her effort to push the company in a more data-driven direction, at the same time as she managed a team of data scientists for the first time.