Scott Sorensen, CTO of Ancestry.com, shares organizational lessons on structuring data science and engineering teams to support complex software architecture.
“It's uncanny how technical architecture follows an organization, and so if you want to decouple systems, you have to decouple the organization. If you want tightly, ah, integrated, if you want something tightly integrated, you have to tightly integrate the organization back to the data science and the engineering teams.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading:
filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard
(the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Scott Sorensen
Insight
Ancestry embeds data scientists into software teams to ensure production readiness
“What we've found, at least at Ancestry, is that we have to embed our data science Scientists into the actual engineering teams and make them talk every day. It improves the feature engineering, improves the domain knowledge, improves the likelihood that engine…”
Scott SorensenJan 16, 2014▶ 20:23Scott Sorensen, CTO of Ancestry.com // Data Driven 19 // October 2013 (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)
Insight
Predictive machine learning models are useless if they cannot inform interventions
“One of the key learnings was that just because something's predictive doesn't mean that it's actionable.”
Scott SorensenJan 16, 2014▶ 8:25Scott Sorensen, CTO of Ancestry.com // Data Driven 19 // October 2013 (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)
AssertionNot checkable as stated
Entity extraction elevated Ancestry's worst-performing data collections into its top 10
“It took what was some of our worst performing collections out of our 30,000, ah, collections, and put some of those collections into our top 10 best, ah, best collections.”
Scott SorensenJan 16, 2014▶ 9:35Scott Sorensen, CTO of Ancestry.com // Data Driven 19 // October 2013 (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)
Insight
Granting academics access to large datasets creates a data science recruiting pipeline
“If you have a large data set and can make it available for academic research, then you could create yourself a pipeline of potentially good data science candidates because they know how to deal with large amounts of data, but they also know your data pretty we…”
Scott SorensenJan 16, 2014▶ 22:42Scott Sorensen, CTO of Ancestry.com // Data Driven 19 // October 2013 (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)
AssertionSupported
Ancestry has 2.7 million paying subscribers and leads online family history
“So, ah, at Ancestry.com, we're the largest online resource for family history, and, ah, we've got 2.7 million paying subscribers.”
Scott SorensenJan 16, 2014▶ 0:42Scott Sorensen, CTO of Ancestry.com // Data Driven 19 // October 2013 (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)
AssertionPartly supported
Ancestry generated $480 million in 2012 revenue across eight countries
“We had, we did, ah, four hundred and eighty million dollars in revenue last year, and we've got offices in eight countries.”
Scott SorensenJan 16, 2014▶ 0:52Scott Sorensen, CTO of Ancestry.com // Data Driven 19 // October 2013 (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)
Made with StarZero
Turn any episode into a week of clips.
This entire site, over 400 conversations transcribed, diarized, checked and made playable,
runs on the StarZero media pipeline. Drop in your own episode and the podcast clipper finds the
moments worth sharing, cuts them, captions them, and reframes them for every feed.
We use essential cookies to make the site work. With your permission we
also use analytics cookies (Google Analytics and Mixpanel) to understand
usage and improve StarZero. See our Cookie Policy.