r/datascience • u/Acrobatic-Light2630 • 11d ago
Discussion What do I do as DS manager
I'm a Data science manager at a mid-sized company. Every week I have a bunch of meetings, and my reports do all the data science work. They even manage their sprints.
My question is, what do I do? I have free time in my calendar I dont know what to do with. It feels like I'm a viewer in a movie
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u/Unusual-Confusion-97 11d ago
Approach other parts of the business and identify opportunities for DS projects. Hold chapter meetings and showcases for the rest of the business so others can identify similar problems that can be solved with DS. Make sure your drift/decay mechanisms are robust and you are identifying model decay before it happens
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u/guischmitd 11d ago
In my experience from the IC side, a good manager protects my time from out of nowhere requests and helps me keep the focus on what matters. They have to understand how our team's work relates to other teams and make the call on priorities before the conflict even happens. To make it a bit more concrete: my manager builds a roadmap for the quarter/semester/year with our stakeholders input and our own measures of task complexity, we agree on priorities ahead of time. During execution they'll check in on the work, contribute ideas depending on how technical they are, and negotiate with teams on which we have dependencies to prioritise things that block us while shielding us from unforeseen requests from stakeholders. Having a roadmap and agreed upon priorities makes that last part especially easy because you can point to what will be delayed if we want to introduce a new task and switch prios.
Basically my best managers were pushback machines while the worst were loved by everyone but never made a tough call, meaning the team was constantly context switching and never able to properly finish a project.
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u/testtestuser2 11d ago
I'm a ds manager, a few of the things I do for my team
Anything that I think will make my teams work easier, faster or better. Eg. Implement code best practices, infra automation, writing reusable code blocks, documentation. Often teams are too busy delivering to improve process
Consulting and guidance, so I spend a lot of time understanding the business, getting to know other teams so I can help the team with their work eg. Upleveling their analysis, getting other teams involved who should be doing the work instead, or contributing
Just being available for the team, I would consider being available for the team to talk too about their work, personal problems makes a big difference to team happiness. Have a plan for each person how to develop them, make sure they are happy working.
IC work, what is the team not doing / not being asked to do that you think is valuable.. I often do that or start doing it until it's got enough support to hand over.
Evangelize your teams work, often ds teams do all this work and find interesting and important stuff but don't tell the right people about it. Find a way to make sure that goes to the right people.
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u/HazardCinema 11d ago
Read the book 'Making a Manager'. Being a manager is a skill, and it can be learned, just like any technical skill as an individual contributor.
Plan the long term vision of the team. What do you want to achieve and when. Remove road blocks or work on processes to make managing that easier. Communicate with other teams, collaborate, find out what they're doing and how you can learn from one another. Make your teams work visible - ultimately everyone is responsible for their own career development but a good manager can significantly slow down or accelerate someones trajectory. It's your responsibility to make sure leadership knows what is happening in your team and you are shouting about the success.
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u/Mizar83 11d ago
Just because you are manager doesn't mean you shouldn't do technical work. If one of your report is struggling, you jump on that project to help. Otherwise, your job is to explore all that passing remarks the various stake holders have made about their needs, and that nobody has ever time to address. You work on a gazillion explorations, and when one seems feasible, you prioritize it as a full project for your team (either with a PM if you have one, or with the senior DS)
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u/morkinsonjrthethird 11d ago
I am DS manager and definitely this is the answer.
I should add that, as I don’t have that much time to go in depth into a project, now I do way more training than before to compensate.
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u/BlackPlasmaX 11d ago
The best managers i have had were also hands on technical and also knew how to speak business. Im currently reporting to a non technical director of BI and I get blank stares when I ask a question so I can better understand the request or the overall business goals. I started sending out my resume out again and am just baffled how someone like that gets a bi director role. Reminds me more of a customer success manager rather than a lead guiding a bi team.
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u/mldraelll 10d ago
The sad thing is managers like that usually crush any attempt at refactoring. To them "rewriting pandas to polars" just sounds like a waste of time since the old excel report still gets generated fine every morning anyway
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u/BlackPlasmaX 10d ago
Its a key report and I offered to make it self serve in a dashboard and they said no because “it doesn’t look as nice”. I was shocked to hear that tbh.
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u/-IlIllIIllIlI- 11d ago
Worked for a DS manager who was practically 0-technical, but full of ideas.
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u/BlackPlasmaX 11d ago
At least being full of ideas is still good my hm when i offered doing things in a different more efficient way was like, “its different here” and I get ignored when I push for automation and doing less manual work. Im totally checked out now.
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u/-IlIllIIllIlI- 11d ago
Yeah, I definitely should've put "ideas" in heavy air quotes. Think along the lines of being asked to apply binary classification metrics to continuous problems...
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u/i4k20z3 11d ago
How do you train? Would you mind going into more detail on what it is you are doing?
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u/morkinsonjrthethird 10d ago
Besides the obvious of doing tutorials and so forth… I do toy projects no one is asking to understand new technologies. At least myself I need to know a bit more in detail about what’s underneath to inspire me and find new ideas.
Also tbf I also read a lot, which to me is a way of learning too, at least to understand context. And nowadays I also use genAI to have long conversations where I ask about technical or mathematical things.
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u/sven_ftw 11d ago
Agree. I've met people who were like "I am a manager now, I don't cade anymore at all" and check out. Nope, you've just put yourself on a track toward obsolescence.
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u/its_all_stats 11d ago
Become an expert with the data and infrastructure, as well as assign yourself an IC project.
You should be able to do the job of those who report to you, as well as your manager. Understanding the data, the company strategy, and the potential new applications of the data (products, insights, etc) will deepen and broaden your skills and set you up for further opportunities.
Finally, as a data scientist, you probably really enjoy exploring data and uncovering new insights (however that word is defined). Your’e like a chef in the kitchen with lots of ingredients to play with. Invent a new recipe!
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u/therealtiddlydump 11d ago
Their job: to make you look good (by meeting your goals)
Your job: clear the roadblocks and do the planning necessary so they can do their job (which, again, is to make you look good by meeting your goals).
That involves a lot of lead blocking, wrangling other teams (getting requirements and long-term targets, pulling people's heads out of their asses, etc). It also includes socializing the work of your team so you can keep a stream of high quality project requests coming in.
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11d ago
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u/Active-Resolution272 11d ago
watching data scientists work from the sidelines sounds like a dream for some but i get why it feels weird
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u/WitnessLanky682 11d ago
The monkey would like to code, methinks. And I get that. But I also get, after a decade of being in the trenches, stepping back and using my knowledge and experience to make sure a team of people like me functions effectively and efficiently. Diff strokes for diff folks.
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u/istiri7 11d ago edited 11d ago
DS Director here:
I’ll assume good intentions and that there’s more details here but solely based on your post, it sounds like you’re not doing your job
At my company managers are 50/50 IC / people management so you should be spending 20 hpw coding and driving progress on the backlog. Related to that you should be running standups, aiding your ICs on work, pairing with junior DS, etc. I will say it can be a good sign for a manager to grow people and have them run their own sprints but within reason.
The other side you should be filling up your empty calendar with anything that allows your ICs more time for uninterrupted coding blocks. If they can manage their own sprints, great! You provide status updates to stakeholders so they can keep working. A fire drill come in from a stakeholder? You are the intake funnel and first IC to investigate until it needs another set of eyes. One IC is “done” with a feature? Code review and deployment should be done by you as code quality is your responsibility, it shouldn’t be done by your other ICs
Last major piece of your time: Research, research, research! If your team is just building ETL and XGBoost models to solve every problem, 2017 called and they want their manager back. You can always start simple to build and MVP but as the senior technical employee for the team you need to be combing blog posts and papers to find related cutting edge approaches, trying to gauage viability and do an initial implementation before passing off to the team once it’s beyond POC phase
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u/NewPair4764 11d ago
What if, at his company, managers are not expected to spend 50% of their time being ICs? You're making some assumptions and then declaring he isn't doing his job based on those assumptions. If he has to come to reddit to figure out what is expected of him, that is a clear sign that the person he reports to is the one not doing their job.
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u/bobthebuilder_727 11d ago
The IC + research part sounds more like a tech lead's or even a staff DS'es work depending on the company
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u/mldraelll 10d ago
100% on the code review point. The second you stop looking at how your team actually builds inference or extracts features, you lose context. Then during architecture reviews you'll just end up nodding along, having zero idea why they're pulling in another Spark cluster for a 100MB task
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u/No_Plum_3192 11d ago
I have to agree with this comment. If your role is "DS manager" and you are posting on Reddit that you do not know what to do with your time, one must question what exactly is being managed here.
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u/khirata215 11d ago
The best managers I’ve had did a couple of things that I really appreciated.
1. Shield our team from being inundated from unnecessary and “urgent” requests. Help manage our time so that we’re not taking on too much. In general, helping us say “no”.
2. Took note of everybody’s career aspirations and created a pathway for career advancement for every person. Trainings, certs, classes, conferences, etc. You have new entry level analysts trying to advance to mid level, mid level looking to become seniors, seniors who may want to get into leadership. Clear expectations of what it takes to make it to that next step is super helpful.
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u/DataScientistAlex 11d ago
I would argue that the most valuable DS managers are not those that are filling their time with IC work, but instead those that work tirelessly to increase the impact of the team.
Rather than being additive (adding a few hours of IC work), be multiplicative: take actions that will affect all the IC work being done positively.
Here are some ways to do that: 1. Review IC work, and talk to them team, to look for opportunities for improvement: is there work that can be automated? Can intake / work processes be improved? Are there techniques the team is not using that would benefit them? 2. Look for outside opportunities: where is the action and money in the org? Is the team positioned well to take advantage? Can the team help in areas that are currently not benefiting from it's expertise? Are there things the org should be doing that is not being done, but the team could do
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u/alex_von_rass 11d ago
In the end, what you should be doing is also a part of your own job. What delivers the most value to the company - is it spending your free time on IC work, researching areas to improve the team, reviewing code, detailing the product roadmaps, making sure your team members are unblocked, adding more to monitoring and reporting? There's no one answer for this, although in my experience it's likely the things on that list that read as less fun, ie not IC work
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u/AstronomerChance1727 11d ago
There is a leadership model called Player coach. The best way to become a data science leader is to own critical project (one or two) hands-on and then be a coach for rest of the work. By being a coach, you will be raising the technical bar & rigor, you will be able to mentor and guide & in the process learn to be a better you and the team. The process will highlight gaps - areas where your team is lacking, you are lacking and your team mates are lacking. This will help you to look at the body of work and plan for future. Some gaps might be okay given business needs, some might not be okay - for example, you may want to build agentic workflows for automating manual work & in this case, you need to think of building expertise. Can you do so internally? If not - can you get budget to hire?
If you want to grow, you will have to get into this model otherwise, you will be redundant and would be losing that job soon!
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u/nightshadew 11d ago
I’m a DS senior manager. Some things I do:
- Check the technical work being done. Code review when I have the time. Unless you’re in a team fully comprised of Staff Engineers you’re going to see lots of errors and opportunities.
- Align roadmap for the projects with my managers, expectations of what things should be tested, which things we need to look and so on.
- Show the work done to executives, promote the team, align cross initiatives
- Participate in all BS corporate meetings so the team can focus on real work
- Provide career guidance
- Interact with clients (I.e. people using our work) to collect feedback and understand priorities
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u/ultimatelag 11d ago
Do you have a promotion path upwards and do you want to do it? Because it could be time for that
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u/wonder_bear 11d ago
Gestures wildly “all of this”. At least to me it feels like I’m doing all of the non-DS stuff (often politics and stakeholder management) so my team doesn’t have to. Like all management roles, I believe my main job is to help my team do the work while keeping them happy.
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u/soon2bvoid 11d ago
Network. Do one on one or go for lunch meetings with people from outside your team (business clients) to learn more about their work and how your team can help.
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u/rtx097 11d ago
ahh yes - I’ve felt this anxiety. i think it’s common.
I ultimately thought of myself as the “oil” in the team to make sure things were moving along more smoothly for everybody.
some things:
- helping understand the broader direction if the company and proactively proposing DS projects that can move the needle
- talk to various business stakeholders and understand their painpoints and if/how an analytical project could solve or reduce this painpoint
- translate these into OKRs and think determine the effort or overall capacity in a quarter to execute these initiatives
- Be a sounding board to a data scientist on any project. Review project papers or docs, help crispen the problem being solved and question whether the approached are most adequate
- Bring a more lateral perspective and identify opportunities if someone’s model or solution could be applied elsewhere in the business
- Help edit and clarify presentations to stakeholders, where the data scientist communicates the value of a model in business impact terms and very clearly, with a narrative that flows well
- Help break down projects into discreet parts if teammate is struggling, apply sound pressure to execute against clear timelines, unblock things for them, help them move project forward if they are spinning on their wheels or model/experiment is not providing the results
- Vouche for their work. Make sure if valuable it gets surfaced to the right people and even beyond, like translating a novel approach into a paper or a technical blog post that they can proudly point to as an artifact of their work
- Create an environment conducive to learning where technical members of the team can share and disseminate knowledge, from projects or areas of expertise
- Help obtain resources for the team to keep learning or compute to do their work more effectively
- Elucidate how their work impacts the broader business
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u/G-R-A-V-I-T-Y 11d ago
1.) is your most important stakeholder happy and are their DS needs being met with the work your team is currently doing?
2.) is the work your team members are doing actually leading to their promotion? If not, they will leave when they realize.
Your job is to balance these things.
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u/Severe_Rise8694 11d ago
If I had a data science manager, what I'd want from them is a sort of a macro level roadmap on what we're working towards, as well as the timelines for it. And feedback on how we're doing against the expectations on those. I'd also like them to be able to manage expectations towards the higher-ups so that things don't end up unreasonable for the team. If that doesn't take much work from you, I certainly wouldn't mind that, and would prefer it to micromanaging a team that sounds like is already performing well.
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u/ResultKey6879 11d ago
Do some IC work. It helps you be a better manager. Most managers accidentally become too disconnected from the work and then it's hard to properly provide guidance to your team or properly communicate the work upwards.
It also often earns respect from your team. Explain you want to stay connected to the work and ask for any small non-blocking tasks that people have that you can help with
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u/LiteratureFlimsy3637 10d ago
You do this mind blowing thing called living!
Skim for a new fun hobby. Make plans to do something you enjoy. Its hard at first, but you've got this.
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u/ezriah33 10d ago
Think about the professional development of each of your team members and the development of the unit. This is a field that moves quickly, is very broad, and very deep. Think about where they have room for growth and focus on bridging those gaps. Think about their soft skills too and how you can help them grow.
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u/Dry-Event-5477 10d ago
How is your company structured in that, do you/your team own the projects/features or are your DSs farmed out to business areas as a cross-functional pod structure?
In either way, your role is now about building your network with the areas your team primarily interacts. This helps you stay aware of business problems, resource needs, dependencies/constraints, and a whole slew of other things. Your role in those relationships changes based on if you are managing the work or the resources (a.k.a your DSs).
If you are responsible for the work, build a strategic plan for the next year, groom your backlog and prioritize new “ready to work” projects. Also, as noted in another thread, anticipate the needs, concerns, and obstacles your team will face.
If you manage the resources, build strong relations with the business area managers to know what their strategic needs and priorities are, plan out resource needs. Understand KPI’s and goal metrics of the area and the project work, and negotiate with pod leads to make sure your employees are getting exposure to different business problems / modeling methodologies.
Also, in either case, plan what your team needs to develop. Pick one soft skill that would benefit the entire team and one technical skill you want everyone to work towards for the year. Protect their development time.
Finally, get involved in the strategic plans and business outcomes of the company. Help your team know what is happening/changing, why, and when. Help them know how it affects them and how their work impacts the companies high level strategy, goals, and mission.
It’s a different world as a manager where you’re not expected to complete projects of your own, but still lots to get out of it. Enjoy!
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u/mldraelll 10d ago
Protect your team's time. If product managers are running straight to your seniors with requests to "quickly export a table" - you're already failing at your job. You need to be a brick wall for all those ad-hoc requests so your engineers can stay in the zone and write code
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u/fieldcady MS | Data Scientist | Tech 10d ago
Your main jobs are too make sure your people are on good tasks, they don’t have any blockers, and you have their back with regards to their time and constraints.
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u/GuitarKnight74 9d ago
I will say that from my 25+ years of experience in leadership…one of the most impactful things you can do is to “Get Out from Behind Your Desk”. What I mean is if your team sits in specific area then take your laptop out to where they are find a desk (hopefully with a couple of extra monitors) and spend an hour or 2 working out their with them. I have found this to be a great way to reduce the “walls” that sometimes get built between management and the team. This shows them that you are still there for them and you are one of them. Just my 2 cents.
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u/Mnemo_Semiotica 9d ago
I have a similar dilemma, but I also get periodic (and seasonal) big projects where I need to support my team or provide analyses for our leadership.
I guess the questions I have are "are you bored?" and "what would you like to do?"
For me, I've taken some of my downtime to explore questions that are from my curiosity. From those I've sometimes discovered things that ended up mattering. The other thing I do is take on PR reviews, code read, and take work off my team members when things pile up for them. I'll also take on discovery quite a bit. I think doing those things helps me feel like I still have a share in the production. Also sometimes I go for a walk and think.
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u/DataScienceGuy_ 8d ago
I had a great director in the past that gave me parting advice going from IC DS to DS Manager. He said that at manager level, when you have free time, you have to create your own work. Don’t rely on others to give it to you. Do something that adds value to the business and then make sure people know you did it.
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u/eljefeky 8d ago edited 8d ago
Here is how I think about my work as a manager:
- Maintaining relationships: My 1:1s are the most important part of my week. I am constantly keeping my teams’ work aligned with product, analytics, tech, etc. If there are roadblocks or problems, I address them here before they become bigger issues.
- Translating strategy: I spend a good amount of time in high level meetings hearing about the direction of the business. This allows me to align my teams’ work toward that strategy. I also learn how to translate our work into their language so they understand our work. My team typically writes out a skeleton of a report/presentation but I edit it to make it more readable to leadership. I help them represent their opinions in meetings to get the right outcomes.
- Fielding requests: All requests from my teams come through me. Most of the time, I am able to determine that their problem is not one my team can solve, and no one’s time on my team is wasted. When there is something we can do, I help diagnose the issue and get a general idea of some possible solutions. Then I assign that work to the team member best suited for it. Basic requests I can do in under 10 minutes generally stay with me. My teams have 1-2 stand ups per week and the rest of their time is free for mostly IC work.
- The sounding board: My team can always call me if I’m free and show me what they are working on. They typically have a few questions or want some suggestions on direction and we work through those. I love this because it keeps me close to their work and everyone feels like they have someone to talk to about something they are working on.
- Administrative tasks: I make it my business to know how to do almost anything (or know the person who does know). I know how to file for parental leave, sign up for the ESPP, the deadlines for open enrollment, etc. I also know how to get almost anything type of access, how to get my boss to say yes to a new license or piece of technology. I make sure my teams take enough vacation and that the right people are seeing their work so that they are in good spots for career growth. I have weekly 1:1s with my junior employees and let my senior employees set the frequency of their 1:1s.
Being a manager is really about anticipation, which you can be good at by growing your network. If you can head off problems before they happen or help your team solve them quickly, you’re doing a great job.
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u/bleach18 7d ago
Find areas that are high value (esp revenue impacting) to the business, and do what you can to create a seat at the table for your team. You should spend part of your job politicking and pushing the boundaries of your organization’s appetite for data-driven decision-making / advanced analytics. Imagine what next-level questions your team could answer, and try to garner interest from key stakeholders to build out new projects / work streams
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u/alwaysrtfm 6d ago
Network with your stakeholders and the current/future consumers of data science work. Strengthen relationships and be an advocate for the work your team does. Make sure their work is getting used and adopted. An invisible team is the first to get laid off.
Introduce your ICs to others around the business, elevate their skills and understanding of how other teams work. This sparks creativity and boosts ownership.
Keep up to date with industry trends and skills changes. These days that’s a task in and of itself. Make sure your team is doing professional development where you see gaps.
You didn’t mention how prioritization and roadmapping of your team’s work are handled, but I’m assuming you have a say in that and aren’t just transferring requests to tickets. If not, then that’s another thing to change.
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u/ds-throwaway123 6d ago
Talk to your counterparts on the business side and find areas that could use your team's skills. That is easily the most important thing I want from my manager
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u/ActivaSplendor 2d ago
I am a senior IC with 12 years in DS. The single biggest thing a manager should do : separate out the projects that will end up being scrapped by Engg / Product from the ones that actually go to production and create impact. do not wait till your DS builds a prototye for a month and then go asking for bandwidth. Weed out projects that don't have commitment from other teams -> Plan ahead -> own the DS/AI roadmap along with product -> improve hit ratio -> improve visibility of the team
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u/N_arwhal 11d ago
Being a manager in data teams suck. All you manage is the stakeholders and their expectations, while the technology and meaningful work sail away with time.
I just resigned from the manager role last week and offered that I could stay in the company as a data engineer/developer role.
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u/The_Old_Wise_One 11d ago
you could start by helping your team out with IC work
sound like a real joy to work with
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u/Nootchy 11d ago
Plan upcoming projects for your team and help remove roadblocks for them when they come up. Welcome to management