Priyanka Nath

As a startup founder/product head, I realized the customer feedback forms the basis on which decisions can be made. But a thing to remember is that not all data sources are equal. For example: Surveys have limited insight into customer thought patterns. More ever we found them to be misleading many times. While customer interviews are a good way to clean a customer's thought process, they are time consuming. The product team would need to find a organization dependent middle ground between the time taken and quality of feedback.

User Insights on a small segment of customers are the basis which you need to form hypothesis on the general user behavior. These insights then need to be validated on the larger segment of customer base to be treated as an evidence of Customer behavior. While working at a e-commerce company, I was able to write a evidence based article/whitepaper, that analyzed the impact of devices on customer behaviors.

Subscribe to good blogs on Substack, which has quite a few good ones. One such blog which I published on Substack is Machine learning Diaries - https://vevesta.substack.com/ . Here I detail out research papers of interest to the community. :)

I would take a different perspective here, its technically impossible in this industry to stay on top of things in all diverse topics. So choose your topic of choice say recommendations/Computer vision etc. Try to choose the topic that is relevant or closely aligned to your job profile at hand. Another way, a path of least resistance is to take a project at work on the tech you wish to up skill on. Learn all that is to be read and learnt. Implement it at your job to drive impact and results. Its important to remember, something Prof Sanjiva Prasad at CSE-IIT Delhi taught me, you can't truly learn the topic till you have implemented it.

I would suggest build domain/business knowledge. I am saying so because when you have domain knowledge: 1. Your models work better because you are able to do better feature engineering using the business knowledge. 2. You are a better story teller of data since you understand the underlying market forces. 3. You are a valuable person in the company since you are the person business can talk about their requirements. 4. You can think fresh ideas of what to implement at your organization which is not based on the latest technological crazy but rather a in depth understand what moves the bottom line for the business.