How data scientists can best communicate with non-DS people
The stakeholder-data scientist relationship
A stakeholder is anyone who has a vested interest in the decision making or activities of a project or business. They could be internal coworkers or external clients.
Any time a data scientist works on a project at a company they are not working in isolation. There is always a business purpose for the project they are creating.
For example, if you as a data scientist are developing a model that can forecast energy usage in a specific commercial building, stakeholders may include:
- Building owners/managers
- Engineers working on projects on-site
- Coworkers at your organization that will deliver results to the client (eg software engineers or BI analysts who will create dashboards)
Most stakeholders come from a non-data science background. They may be business analysts, sales people, or engineers and have various levels of understanding of ML, AI and data science.
Despite this, whenever a data science solution is needed for a project, these “non-technical” (for lack of a better word) stakeholders play an…