In my current team we have decided to split up the work in a number of workstreams, which are in effect subteams responsible for different aspects of the product. One workstream might be responsible for product instrumentation, another for improving the recommendation algorithms, another responsible for the application’s look and feel. Each workstream has its own backlog and its own set of quarterly commitments, which map nicely to quarterly OKRs.

Workstreams aren’t necessarily disjoint: the same person might contribute to more than one work stream. Indeed for specialists (UX researchers, UI specialists, data science), that is almost the norm. As an aspiring data scientist myself, I contribute to several workstreams; I may entirely own a key result assigned to a workstream, or provide input (e.g. statistical advice, experiment sizing, etc) to another.

We don’t do daily standups, not even among the software engineers. Instead we meet twice weekly for 30 minutes and review the current plans, update the board, and make sure no one is blocked.

We’ve adopted this process early this year. The response from the team has been generally positive. Compared to a more traditional front-end vs back-end division of labour, the team has cited the following benefits:

• tighter team cohesion
• better understanding of what the others are working on
• more productive team meetings
• greater sense of accomplishments

The main drawback with this system affects those of us in a more specialized role, such as UI, UX, or Data Science, who contribute to more than one workstream. We find ourselves compelled to attend the semi-weekly meetings of all the workstreams we are involved with, and never know which ones we can safely skip. On top of this I also have a weekly Data Science sync with the product manager.

At a recent retrospective we have agreed to mitigate these issues by the following:

• notes should be taken at all meetings, and the note-taker should remember to tag any team member who might be absent but who might need to know something important;
• we will shorten the sync meetings to 15 minutes, and defragment them so that two workstreams could have their syncs done in the same half-hour (and sometimes the same room).

I can’t say that this is the final perfect solution to embed a data scientist in a product team but at least we have an adaptive process in place: a system to regularly iterate on our processes and give the team permission to adapt their working agreements.

Are you a specialist embedded in a product team mostly made up of software engineers? How do you interact with the rest of the team? I’d love to hear your story in the comments below.