The 4 Steps to Build Out Your Machine Learning Team Productively

Over the past few years, machine learning has grown tremendously. But as young as machine learning is as a discipline, the craft of managing a machine learning team is even younger. Many of today’s machine learning mangers were thrust into management roles out of necessity or because they were the best individual contributors, and many come from purely academic backgrounds. At some companies, engineering or product leaders are being tasked with building new machine learning functions without any real machine learning experience.

Running any technical team is hard:

• You have to hire great people.
• You need to manage and develop them.
• You need to manage your team’s output and make sure your vectors are aligned.
• You would want to make good long-term technical choices and manage technical debt.
• You also must manage expectations from leadership.

Running a Machine Learning team is even harder:

• Machine Learning talents are expensive and scarce.
• Machine Learning teams have a diverse set of roles.
• Machine Learning projects have unclear timelines and high uncertainty.
• Machine Learning is also…