What does it mean to work on something that matters? How can we align our priorities so that this “something” matters to everyone?
Varoon Bashyakarla, a data scientist in the Bay Area, helps us answer these questions. Not only has he used data science to address public safety, public health, and cyber security, but he also has a unique take on how personal relationships can inform team productivity.
Below is my “How We Get Shit Done (HWGSD)” chat with Varoon. Here are the highlights:
→ No one can really define “data science,” but we know it has the potential to do good.
→ Personal time-saving apps like Alfred are dope.
→ On a team, the biggest barrier to productivity is the misalignment of priorities.
→ When you have real relationships with the people you work with, getting stuff done is a lot easier.
To set the stage, what’s your background with data science?
First, to address the elephant in the room, no one really knows what “data science” is. Everyone can agree it’s a buzzword, but beyond that, what is it?
I studied statistics and econ in college. I wanted to tackle scientific problems through a mathematical lens, and economic models made a ton of assumptions, so I wanted to be able to test those assumptions too. That’s what let me to statistics. I believe in the truth of mathematically-grounded inquiry: you can learn a lot from the stories that numbers tell.
After graduation, I spent a summer in Chicago through the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Data Science for Social Good Fellowship. We helped refine some of the Chicago Police Department’s predictive algorithms of violent crime. That was my first experience with “data science.”
After that, I moved to San Francisco and worked at Dropbox, mostly in predictive modeling. I worked with the sales team to build a model for which customers were likely to purchase our products, and I worked with the security team on statistical methods to predict abusive attacks on Dropbox. Now I’m at Wealthfront working on the data science team.
One thing that’s been important to me is the opportunity to work on things that really matter. For example, after college, I started a project in my spare time in which I scraped every post on Craiglist’s “Men Seeking Men” personals section in every locale in the United States. I collected the title of the ad, the text, the age of the poster, the city and state where it was posted, whether Craigslist cross-posted anywhere else, the timestamp, whether the post was subsequently updated, whether or not the ad contained a photo…
I wanted to use this data to answer questions I was curious about, like “If you’re a gay man living in a conservative part of the country, are you more likely to resort to a forum like Craigslist to solicit gay sex than if you’re living in San Francisco?” And “Is that something we can measure by seeing if posts per capita are higher in conservative areas than in liberal ones?”
The whole point of the exercise was to see if we could use this information to refine how we allocate federal HIV prevention funding. I wrote my findings up into a paper and I got to present it at Bloomberg [KDD2014] last year!
I’ve never been a ‘numbers for numbers’ sake’ kind of person.
What excited me about the work I did in Chicago, the Craigslist project, the work I did with the cyber security team at Dropbox, and now at Wealthfront (bringing financial services to everyday people), is the chance to work on something that really matters. I’ve never been a “numbers for numbers’ sake” kind of person. And a lot of smart people with technical skills end up spending their careers determining what ads to show people on the Internet… For me, bigger causes are more exciting and motivating.
At the companies and organizations you worked for, were there any particular systems or tools that your teams used to get work done?
Personally, I’m a big fan of Alfred. It probably saves me an hour a week. You can set up keyboard shortcuts and find files on your computer super easily. Also aText and TextExpander, which let you set up shortcuts for commonly-typed phrases. So instead of typing out “Thank you,” you can just hit “ty” and have this program print out “Thank you.” Instance by instance, it’s not a lot of time. But over the course of a week or a month, it saves your fingers.
Within teams, I’ve used Stash, which is a version-control system built by Atlassian, and it integrates with Git. You can submit every piece of code you write to be reviewed there. I’ve also used Jira, which lets people submit tickets: “Hey, there’s a bug in this feature, I’m going to assign it to you.” For customer support interactions, I’ve mostly used ZenDesk.
It’s such a Silicon Valley cliche, but in terms of process, I think it’s important to get something out there and then iterate on it. It doesn’t matter if it’s sexy new feature that your company is launching, or if it’s a totally unsexy internal tool… Just get a first version out there, get people’s thoughts and feedback, and iterate. But, of course, getting that first thing out the door is always tough.
What are some stumbling blocks you’ve encountered when it comes to getting things done as a team?
The biggest barrier to productivity is the misalignment of priorities.
Usually, it’s not the technical scope (or even the non-technical scope) of what we’re trying to do. The biggest barrier to productivity is the misalignment of priorities.
Because when our priorities are aligned — when all the key stakeholders are on the same page about something — then shit will get done.
But if people feel like they have three jobs-worth of work to do, and there’s a misunderstanding of the relative importance of something, then some things will slip through the cracks. There might be something that’s really important for me, but if it’s much farther down on my colleague’s list of priorities, then they’re going to be busy with something else.
Sometimes we’re in a situation where something hasn’t moved forward, so finally we conclude it wasn’t such a good idea after all. We’re explicitly stating our implicitly-held beliefs about the importance of whatever we were doing. If what we’re working on wasn’t moving forward, maybe it was because it wasn’t the highest priority and it doesn’t justify the resources it would take to do at the moment.
In meetings, I’ve seen people ask, “We’re thinking about doing X. We know it’s going to take some resources, but everyone’s busy. Should we do it?” Or, “On a scale of 1 to 10, how strongly do you feel about this?” If it’s not above a 7 or an 8, it’s not going to happen.
Speaking of productivity, there something I’ve been struggling with… Although I’ve been obsessed with good systems and efficiency, I just read Peopleware. The book reminds us that, especially in tech, we need to prioritize humans over efficiency: making people feel comfortable, happy, and trusted at work will serve us so much better than any “productivity hack.”
When it comes time to get stuff done, your relationships manifest themselves.
That just reminded me, something I neglected to mention about getting things done! When I feel like I have real relationships with the people I work with — if I have a sense of their story, what motivates them, why they’re here, why they’re not somewhere else, what their sense of humor’s like, what their ticks are — I find that getting stuff done is so much easier. If I’m comfortable around my coworkers, it has a huge influence on how productive I can be. When it comes time to get stuff done, your relationships really manifest themselves.