Designers and Data Scientists. Oh My!

I often ask founders, “What type of people are you looking to hire?” The answer is always either a designer or a data scientist.

If the company says a designer then the current product, in the mind of the founders, isn’t working because the look and feel is bad. If the company says a data scientist they are looking for a way to make useful information from their data.

When I continue to probe the founders I have found there is some confusion with what the roles entail. Everyone is looking for these people to transform their companies. But exactly what do they do and where do you find them?

Data Scientists

Data scientists are people who derive actionable intelligence from data. I am using the term intelligence as the way it is defined by intelligence organizations. Information is not intelligence.

So, data scientists take lots of information, or data, and make actionable information from it. I like what David Hardtke said about data scientists and their skill sets.

A Data Scientist as someone who knows just enough programming, system administration, and statistics to transform a large, possibly heterogeneous set of unstructured data into actionable intelligence or an actual product. The Data Scientist must also have sufficient visualization and communication skills to be able to convince someone that they did it correctly.

Data scientists don’t identify themselves as data scientists. They have a deep knowledge base which they are utilizing to get insights from data. Which means every data scientist has a specialization in their particular field.

David Hardtke suggests [identifying][1] data scientists by finding disgruntled post doctoral research candidate who has yet to land a professorship at a university.

Designers

Designers were previously thought of as a nice afterthought. As soon as Apple started it’s meteoric rise to the largest company on the planet this changed. Many attribute the design of Apple products to it’s success.

Every startup seems to constantly be looking for a designer. The challenge is, developers and product people think of designers differently. Developers expect designers to write front-end code; the Javascript in web applications while product people expect the designer to handle the user interface and experience of the application.

Designers think even differently of themselves. D. Keith Robinson says this is how a product designer spends his time.

30% Product Management. Strategy, competitive analysis, metrics analysis, project management, resource allocation, feature scoping, requirements gathering, etc.

30% Design. In my mind there is a ton of overlap here, so I’ve got no problems calling all of this design, but since this is usually a sticking point I’ve tried to break it down further: 30% Interaction (UX, flow, states, etc.), 25% Conceptual (research, sketching, ideation, etc.), 25% Interface (UI, IA, layout), 20% Visual

20% User research. Interviews, testing, scheduling interviews, follow-ups, talking with our support folks, etc.

20% Other stuff. Design reviews, prototyping, coding, asset building, etc.

When looking for a designer it’s important to outline exactly what you need. The term product designer encompasses so many areas of knowledge that it may be more helpful outlining exactly what you want the person to do. It seems designer is just an overly broad term that is used too often.