This rings so true. Last April, I had a chance to chat with an engineer at an (explosively growing) early stage B2C startup. He gave a talk about "data science", so I walked up to him afterwards and asked him if he considered himself to be a data scientist and did anything that's remotely like statistical inference.
He said, "nah, most of what I do is collecting a lot of data and just segmenting them in a bunch of ways. Pivot tables go really far as far as product insights are concerned."
Then, he added, "that whole data science thing in my talk...that was to grab attention."
I am NOT saying statistics and machine learning is useless. They are tremendously useful. But chances are good that it pays a lot more early on to collect a lot of data and ask basic questions from different perspectives.
Yep, there are plenty of useful (and actionable) insights to be gained just by the data you can get in a standard analytics dashboard. If you know how many people did what, and who came back, you can already learn so much about how people are using your app and what you should focus on.
[+] [-] kiyoto|11 years ago|reply
He said, "nah, most of what I do is collecting a lot of data and just segmenting them in a bunch of ways. Pivot tables go really far as far as product insights are concerned."
Then, he added, "that whole data science thing in my talk...that was to grab attention."
I am NOT saying statistics and machine learning is useless. They are tremendously useful. But chances are good that it pays a lot more early on to collect a lot of data and ask basic questions from different perspectives.
[+] [-] alishiu|11 years ago|reply