Micro Tours of Duty
This is the part of a series on how to build a data science team, including how to form a team with human skills, not technical skills, avoiding dancing bear storytelling, data science halo bias, visualizing Cassie Kozyrkov’s 11 key data science roles, and On Data Science Career Paths and the subject of this post, data science tour of duty.
Data science tours of duty, which advocates for job rotation to learn decision-making, sparked thoughtful comments on LinkedIn. Richad Nieves-Becker raised a real and practical challenge: “Were a data scientist on my team to propose this to me, I'd think highly of them (after "oh God logistics,” of course).”
Richad nailed it. Are internships prevalent in college because we “have the time?” Are logistics why we stop doing them? His point reminded me of a tour of duty I did after college that was valuable, short & sweet. A micro tour of duty…
Years ago, as a new product manager, I was writing our sales pitch. It felt wrong. Vapid. My friend suggested I shadow his sales team. This “tour of duty” lasted just 15 hours, but it was like a trip to a foreign land. They didn’t use what I wrote. The simple questions prospects asked floored me. The best sellers told real stories.
The lessons I learned live on: give salespeople real, concrete customer stories to tell. Don’t hallucinate—provide FAQs for the questions customers actually ask. Ruthlessly eliminate jargon.
Fifteen hours was all it took. Nobody noticed the logistics.
Zef Konrad, a student, raised another excellent point--it’s hard to find a tour of duty if you don’t have a job yet.
Or is it? Thinking small can help here too. You don’t need to work for Major League Baseball to analyze your niece’s Little League team. You don’t need to work for National Grid to explore the power consumption of your house. The point is to learn, not to solve world hunger.
Deep immersion has its advantages, but small experiences are better than no experiences. Perfect is the enemy of good. Micro tours of duty can be short and just as sweet as big ones.
