I read the email three times to make sure it meant what I thought it meant. It was an unsolicited invitation to contribute a guest post to KDnuggets, one of the most popular data science blogs in the world. The editors had read about data.world, and wanted us to introduce the platform to their readers.
I know from experience that such invitations are exceedingly rare. We needed to make it count.
Can writing about your own product be as exciting to your audience as it is to you? That’s the question Joe Boutros and I pondered as we planned our approach to the post. This couldn’t be a product walkthrough in a sea of product walkthroughs.
We resolved to tell a story about the people we are building data.world for. As it does in the real world, the platform would play a supporting role for the true star: the data practitioner.
That’s why we decided to tell Alicia’s story, the same story that “helped us channel and empathize with our users before we had them.” In the piece, Joe Boutros’s behind-the-scenes commentary provides the link between Alicia’s world and the product thinking that guides development of the data.world platform.
Here’s how it starts:
I work for Outcomes Worldwide (OW) as a data scientist. Basically, people who are designing aid programs come to me with questions and I answer them with data. Or, they come to me with an existing program that isn’t achieving its goals, and I create models and test their theories to try to figure out what’s not working. I wish I could do more for these programs, but in this organization, there are far more people with problems than there are people with data science skills to help solve them.
Read Behind the dream of data work as it could be on KDnuggets, and please share it with other data lovers!
