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From Data Scientist to Data Manager: My First 3 Months Leading a Team
Reflections on moving from hands-on work to mentoring and leading
This is the 7th year in my data science career, a journey filled with dashboards, metrics, analyses, and models. But in August, I stepped into a new territory: becoming a people manager for the first time. To be honest, whenever asked about my career goal in the past, I always said I preferred staying on the IC track. I loved the technical challenges and owning projects end-to-end. However, when this opportunity came up, I decided to give it a shot. After all, you don’t know if something is right for you until you try.
In this article, I will share my initial experience as a manager — what has changed, what I’ve enjoyed, and what’s been challenging. If you are debating between the IC and people management path, I hope it will help shed some light.
My path to management
To set the stage, let me share how I transitioned to a people manager. When I first joined the team four years ago, everyone on the team was a ‘full-stack’ data scientist — we each supported a specific domain and owned everything from building data pipelines, defining business metrics, and dashboarding, to analysis, experimentation, and modeling. This framework…
