The world’s leading publication for data science, AI, and ML professionals.

Find Simple Solutions to the Feedback You are Receiving

Three Ways to Make Your Remote Data Science Team Feel Less Isolated

Women in Data Science

Photo from Aziz Acharki on Unsplash
Photo from Aziz Acharki on Unsplash

At the start of my job, I got into the habit of asking my colleagues, mentors, and manager for feedback consistently. I wanted to understand what I was doing well and what could use improvement. Our Data Science team is split into three main groups, in which I am Product Owner and Team Lead for one of them. When I took on this role, the habit of requesting feedback became even more important to me. Requesting feedback and listening to those individuals helps me understand what my team needs from me and how I can better adapt to meet their needs.


Identifying Areas of Improvement

Before leaving for the holiday break, I sat down with my colleagues and asked them what went well this year and what could improve for 2021. The most requested feedback was to find a better way to flow down information so that the team didn’t feel siloed. When I asked for more details about why they were feeling siloed, I received two answers:

  1. Some members felt as though they did not have a good view into projects the other teams were on.
  2. Others wanted to be more involved in understanding the roadmap for each quarter and how our roadmap related to the broader team’s roadmap goals.

Knowing this, I wanted to create simple solutions that could be incorporated into our team meetings. Each week my team meets for 30 to 60 minutes, and it is an open forum, meaning anyone can feel free to bring a topic for discussion. The main issue I was currently bringing to the discussion was initial sprint planning thoughts the Monday before our actual planning session. Otherwise, unless I have a question, I let the team use the forum as a place to ask questions, open discussions around projects, or vent on something.


Breaking the Silo

When talking with the team about how they felt siloed, I learned it was a person by person difference. Not everyone felt they were siloed, but those who did needed more help to feel connected to the broader team. Looking at this situation, I approached the problem with two fundamental changes:

  1. Inviting members to meetings that interest them.
  2. Creating sprint summaries of what I am learning in my meetings and emails with the broader team.

The first change was more straightforward. I have a good understanding of my team’s interests, and if I am unsure, I will ask them. Knowing what they want to be involved in, I can add them into meetings with the broader team aligned with their interests. I can also connect them with individuals who are working on projects they may want to be included in. For some members, this has not been necessary as they reach out to others to be included. Others need the extra push to become more involved in the broader team.

For the second change, I began to create sprint summaries for the team to review with them in our team meetings. During the sprint, I attend many meetings and often take notes. These meetings are with many different teams on planning, project updates, and more. Thinking of this, I decided to make a OneNote notebook that is shared with my group. This notebook contains all my meeting notes along with sprint summaries. These summaries detail out a few different vital topics that have occurred that sprint:

  • Important Information and Action Items – Important information are topics of high interest to someone on the team based on projects they are working on. Action items are tasks or deadlines for my team that need to be addressed. If the item has been placed into the backlog, it will link to that user story or feature for reference.
  • Questions and Answers – This topic is self-explanatory, but these are questions others may have had that I sought answers to or unanswered questions from meetings.
  • 📘 Notes – Topics in the summary that have associated notes from meetings I attended. Not every topic or every discussion will have notes. The ones that do will be tagged with this symbol and then link to the correct OneNote page with the meeting info and notes.
  • 💡 Concepts and Ideas – These are exploratory concepts or ideas brought up in meetings that we may want to investigate later.

Both changes are relatively small and require only 15 minutes in a week to organize my notes and include or connect individuals to projects and work they are interested in. Creating these summaries gave me an excellent topic to quickly cover during our team meetings to flow down information. So far, I have received positive feedback that these two changes have helped people feel less siloed as they have more view into what is going on.


Understanding the Roadmap

The next area for improvement focused on the roadmap. Each month I meet with the other team leads, the two projects co-leads to discuss the roadmap’s current state, priority changes, and any blockers that exist. Every so often, I meet with my team to discuss the roadmap. Towards the end of the year, I received the feedback that more members would like dedicated sessions to understand the roadmap and see how they fit into the broader team’s roadmap. Knowing this, I began to incorporate these discussions into our team meetings more regularly as well.

Before the end of the year, I began dedicating part of our team meetings to discuss the roadmap. I decided to use to team meeting before the monthly road mapping session to capture the current status of work items, align the team priorities with the broader team’s roadmap, and capture questions anyone has. Allowing the roadmap to be apart of our team meetings the week of the road mapping status meeting gave the team two things:

  1. A dedicated roadmap discussion once a month gave them insight into what was going on and where we were headed.
  2. Provided me with status updates and questions I needed to bring to the roadmap status meeting. This method was much more manageable than looking for people individually to fill in the gaps.

Focusing on one team meeting a month on road mapping may take 30 to 60 minutes, but it addresses the teams ask in wanting more insight into the roadmap. The first two meetings dedicated to reviewing the roadmap have provided useful information to the team. The dedicated time to focus on the roadmap brought up many good discussions with them on the plans for 2021. These sessions will be good to continue as the new year begins.


Final Thoughts

As you collect feedback on your work, it may feel overwhelming. Remember, your solutions don’t have to be large, extravagant changes to your regular flow. Simple solutions can provide you with what you are looking for and help you make a positive change to address the feedback. Things I have learned this year as I have requested continuous feedback from my team include:

  • Ask your team for feedback. Feedback can be beneficial for you to know what is going well and what could use improvement.
  • Don’t limit feedback to just your manager. You can ask anyone you work with for feedback. Even those younger or less experienced than you, they too can provide valuable feedback and insights.
  • You don’t need to take all the feedback you get. When reviewing feedback, determine what takeaways you will get from it. Outline your next steps on how you want to improve to work on those action items.
  • Your changes do not need to be large. Sometimes it is as simple as putting together a sprint summary for your team, so they feel less siloed. Look for small change areas that you can make to address your action items.

What feedback have you received this year, and what steps have you taken to address it?


If you would like to read more, check out some of my other articles below!

Top 8 Most Common Questions I Get Asked as a Data Scientist

Effective Data Science Requires Strong Collaboration with Data Engineering

Top 7 Lessons Learned About Code Reviews in Data Science


Related Articles