Building 21st Century Data Science Teams

A traditional data science department is comprised of Data Scientists, Data Engineers and Infrastructure Engineers. This model has a drawback that one role is always dependent on other and likely to criticize them for task failures because they didn't do their job well. These conflicts may reflect in the quality of final data product. So, what went wrong? You probably don't have big data. Jeff Magnusson (Director of Algorithms Platform at Stitch Fix) suggested a clever approach of forming a "High Functioning Data Science Department" which involves building an environment which allows autonomy, ownership, and focus for everyone involved yet at the same time clearly distinguishing the roles of Data Scientists and Data Engineers. Data scientist can't suddenly become talented engineers nor is that engineers will be ignorant of all business logic, the partnership is inherent to the success of this model. You can read more at: http://multithreaded.stitchfix.com/blog/2016/03/16/engineers-shouldnt-write-etl/