The Importance of Understanding Your Data Scientists

For Danielle Crop, the Chief Data Officer of Albertsons, to draw distinctions between “digital” and “data” only limits the ability of an organization to create useful products. One of the reasons I asked Danielle on the show is due to her background as a CDO and former SVP of digital at AMEX, where she also managed  product and design groups. My theory is that data leaders who have been exposed to the worlds of software product and UX design are prone to approach their data product work differently, and so that’s what we dug into this episode.   It didn’t take long for Danielle to share how she pushes her data science team to collaborate with business product managers for a “cross-functional, collaborative” end result. This also means getting the team to understand what their models are personalizing, and how customers experience the data products they use. In short, for her, it is about getting the data team to focus on “outcomes” vs “outputs.”

Scaling some of the data science and ML modeling work at Albertsons is a big challenge, and we talked about one of the big use cases she is trying to enable for customers, as well as one “real-life” non-digital experience that her team’s data science efforts are behind.

The big takeaway for me here was hearing how a CDO like Danielle is really putting customer experience and the company’s brand at the center of their data product work, as opposed solely focusing on ML model development, dashboard/BI creation, and seeing data as a raw ingredient that lives in a vacuum isolated from people.  

In this episode, we cover:

• Danielle’s take on the “D” in CDO: is the distinction between “digital” and “data” even relevant, especially for a food and drug retailer? (01:25)
• The role of data product management and design in her org and how UX (i.e. shopper experience) is influenced by and considered in her team’s data science work (06:05)
• How Danielle’s team thinks about “customers” particularly in the context of internal stakeholders vs. grocery shoppers  (10:20)
• Danielle’s current and future plans for bringing her data team into stores to better understand shoppers and customers (11:11)
• How Danielle’s data team works with the digital shopper experience team (12:02) 
• “Outputs” versus “Outcomes”  for product managers, data science teams, and data products (16:30)
• Building customer loyalty, in-store personalization, and long term brand interaction with data science at Albertsons (20:40)
• How Danielle and her team at Albertsons measure the success of their data products (24:04)
• Finding the problems, building the solutions, and connecting the data to the non-technical side of the company (29:11)

• “Data always comes from somewhere, right? It always has a source. And in our modern world, most of that source is some sort of digital software. So, to distinguish your data from its source is not very smart as a data scientist. You need to understand your data very well, where it came from, how it was developed, and software is a massive source of data. [As a CDO], I think it’s not important to distinguish between [data and digital]. It is important to distinguish between roles and responsibilities, you need different skills for these different areas, but to create an artificial silo between them doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me.”- Danielle  (03:00)
  
  
• “Product managers need to understand what the customer wants, what the business needs, how to pass that along to data scientists and data scientists, and to understand how that’s affecting business outcomes. That’s how I see this all working. And it depends on what type of models they’re customizing and building, right? Are they building personalization models that are going to be a digital asset? Are they building automation models that will go directly to some sort of operational activity in the store? What are they trying to solve?” - Danielle (06:30)
  
  
• “In a company that sells products—groceries—to individuals, personalization is a huge opportunity. How do we make that experience, both in-digital and in-store, more relevant to the customer, more sticky and build loyalty with those customers? That’s the core problem, but underneath that is you got to build a lot of models that help personalize that experience. When you start talking about building a lot of different models, you need scale.”  - Danielle (9:24)
  
  
•  “[Customer interaction in the store] is a true big data problem, right, because you need to use the WiFi devices, et cetera. that you have in store that are pinging the devices at all times, and it’s a massive amount of data. Trying to weed through that and find the important signals that help us to actually drive that type of personalized experience is challenging. No one’s gotten there yet. I hope that we’ll be the first.” -  Danielle (19:50)
  
  
• “I can imagine a checkout clerk who doesn’t want to talk to the customer, despite a data-driven suggestion appearing on the clerk’s monitor as to how to personalize a given customer interaction. The recommendation suggested to the clerk may be ‘accurate from a data science point of view, but if the clerk doesn’t actually act on it, then the data product didn’t provide any value. When I train people in my seminar, I try to get them thinking about that last mile. It may not be data science work, and maybe you have a big enough org where that clerk/customer experience is someone else’s responsibility, but being aware that this is a fault point and having a cross-team perspective is key.” - Brian @rhythmspice (24:50)
  
  
• “We’re going through a moment in time in which trust in data is shaky. What I’d like people to understand and know on a broader philosophical level, is that in order to be able to understand data and use it to make decisions, you have to know its source. You have to understand its source. You have to understand the incentives around that source of data….you have to look at the data from the perspective of what it means and what the incentives were for creating it, and then analyze it, and then give an output. And fortunately, most statisticians, most data scientists, most people in most fields that I know, are incredibly motivated to be ethical and accurate in the information that they’re putting out.” - Danielle (34:15)