The Role of Data Scientists in Product Development

Today I’m chatting with Cole Swain, VP of Product at Tomorrow.io. Tomorrow.io is an untraditional weather company that creates data products to deliver relevant business insights to their customers. Together, Cole and I explore the challenges and opportunities that come with building an untraditional data product. Cole describes some of the practical strategies he’s developed for collecting and implementing qualitative data from customers, as well as why he feels rapport-building with users is a critical skill for product managers. Cole also reveals how scientists are part of the fold when developing products at Tomorrow.io, and the impact that their product has on decision-making across multiple industries. 

Highlights/ Skip to:

• Cole describes what Tomorrow.io does (00:56)
• The types of companies that purchase Tomorrow.io and how they’re using the products (03:45)
• Cole explains how Tomorrow.io developed practical strategies for helping customers get the insights they need from their products (06:10)
• The challenges Cole has encountered trying to design a good user experience for an untraditional data product (11:08)
• Cole describes a time when a Tomorrow.io product didn’t get adopted, and how he and the team pivoted successfully (13:01)
• The impacts and outcomes of decisions made by customers using products from Tomorrow.io (15:16)
• Cole describes the value of understanding your active users and what skills and attributes he feels make a great product manager (20:11)
• Cole explains the challenges of being horizontally positioned rather than operating within an [industry] vertical (23:53)
• The different functions that are involved in developing Tomorrow.io (28:08)
• What keeps Cole up at night as the VP of Product for Tomorrow.io (33:47)
• Cole explains what he would do differently if he could come into his role from the beginning all over again (36:14)

• “[Customers aren't] just going to listen to that objective summary and go do the action. It really has to be supplied with a tremendous amount of information around it in a concise way. ... The assumption upfront was just, if we give you a recommendation, you’ll be able to go ahead and go do that. But it’s just not the case.” – Cole Swain (13:40)
  
  
• “The first challenge is designing this product in a way that you can communicate that value really fast. Because everybody who signs up for new product, they’re very lazy at the beginning. You have to motivate them to be able to realize that, hey, this is something that you can actually harness to change the way that you operate around the weather.” – Cole Swain (11:46)
  
• “People kind of overestimate at times the validity of even just real-time data. So, how do you create an experience that’s intuitive enough to be decision support and create confidence that this tool is different for them, while still having the empathy with the user, that this is still just a forecast in itself; you have to make your own decisions around it.” – Cole Swain (12:43)
  
  
• “What we often find in weather is that the bigger decisions aren’t made in silos. People don’t feel confident to make it on their own and they require a team to be able to come in because they know the unpredictability of the scenarios and they feel that they need to be able to have partners or comrades in the situation that are in it together with them.” – Cole Swain (17:24)
  
  
• “To me, there’s two super key capabilities or strengths in being a successful product manager. It’s pattern recognition and it’s the ability to create fast rapport with a customer: in your first conversation with a customer, within five minutes of talking with them, connect with them.” – Cole Swain (22:06)
  
  
• “[It’s] not about ‘how can we deliver the best value singularly to a particular client,’ but ‘how can we recognize the patterns that rise the tide for all of our customers?’ And it might sound obvious that that’s something that you need to do, but it’s so easy to teeter into the direction of building something unique for a particular vertical.” – Cole Swain (25:41)

• “Our sales team is just always finding new use cases. And we have to continue to say no and we have to continue to be disciplined in this arena. But I’d be lying to tell you if that didn’t keep me up at night when I hear about this opportunity of this solution we could build, and I know it can be done in a matter of X amount of time. But the risk of doing that is just too high, sometimes.” – Cole Swain (35:42)

• Company website: https://Tomorrow.io
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/colemswain