A day in the life of a Product Data Scientist working from anywhere at Spotify

[Music] good morning i actually already woke up a little bit earlier before my alarm because i needed to wait for a nurse to come and do my pcr test and also antibody test since i'm traveling i've been mostly just laying and watching youtube and a little bit editing the script for today today is going to be my day in the life of a data scientist video i'll try to film as much as i can on what i do in one single day and hope you enjoy it there we go okay now the nurse is coming in so i need to go down my heart and do the test so let's go so i'm done with my tests um i had an ambitious plan to go running this morning but it's really warm already and i'm tired so this is not going to happen this is going to be a realistic video where i'm lazy and just working the whole day maybe now it's around 8 25 i start my working at 10 because now i'm an hour after uh stockholm where all of my team is still have like one and a half hour to do my youtube channel work this is what we're gonna do now but first um let's let's go get me some coffee this is my traveling mess and i'm gonna i'm gonna put some sunscreen now and maybe is check out my apartment view i'm living in this complex so yeah a little bit about why i'm here i'm normally located in stockholm but now i'm working from home from moscow so i rented a studio for a bit so that i don't infect my parents but if i have an infection but we'll see we'll see if i have antibodies and i also do the pcr test now and it's a really nice complex here [Music] so thank you [Music] hmm [Music] so in the mornings i like to do stuff for this channel um maybe it's something like writing scripts editing videos writing text for instagram or medium or just doing some administrative stuff i don't do it every morning i think i stole this concept from maybe team ferris but i don't know if he's the original person who came up with the idea of doing like the thing that's really important that you will be procrastinating first during in the morning before working your full-time job so now uh when i wake up a little bit earlier i get time maybe one hour maybe sometimes 30 minutes sometimes even 15 minutes is very valuable to just like sit with my stuff and figure out what i need to do sometimes i get inspired and finished working a little bit later or sometimes it just doesn't happen and then i just sit watching the street and procrastinate while drinking coffee that's still valuable time for me today i need to finish script for this video um yep it does have a script i did plan out today so obviously it's not super natural it's very hard to film natural documentary like content and i'm honestly already afraid of how much footage i will get and how much footage i'll have to edit but we'll see so i need to finish the script and also i need to write questions for a fellow creator who i'll have a call with about how to do brand collaboration so yeah that's my goal for today but maybe i won't be able to i have a lot of ideas of what to film like some of them are properly outlined with the script some of them are completely weird and crazy which i will never do but probably two-thirds of that is pretty good and with additional work can become really interesting videos but i really just don't have enough time i really want to be able to rest and relax as much as i can after my full-time job so i prefer not to do anything work related in the evenings i'm at the point where i'm figuring out whether i should really outsource the video editing because that's the part that i like the least then i have a ton of ideas also what to write i really like writing i love writing scripts i love writing articles and i want to improve myself in this area there's a little less of stuff that i want to write like 20 different ideas mostly because text and like written content is harder to promote or like it doesn't get promoted organically as much as youtube so i try to pour most of my ideas into filming so that's what i'm going to do now while drinking my coffee and eating my breakfast [Music] yeah i finished the script but i didn't write an email maybe i'll probably have to do that tomorrow so now i need to change because i don't want to work in pajamas and actually start the full-time work as a data scientist [Music] [Music] so what do you actually do at work as a data scientist or let me be specific as a product data scientist most of my work or actually now 100 of my work done on this laptop before we could have meetings one-on-one but now because of the current situation that we live in and also because we're going to the work from anywhere idea where you don't have to be in the office and you can permanently work from home i have to constantly stare at my screen that's great it gives flexibility but also it takes away the ability to like see real world things and everything you do is in the screen but let's start from the beginning and see what kind of tasks i can do as a data scientist and i'll try to draw like a little mind map of that so i'm a product data scientist which means that i work with product development teams on a specific feature or specific change to the product the product usually is some kind of digital product like an app or a web interface or something that could be working on your speaker on your mobile phone on your computer and the changes are done by designers and developers so i as a product data scientist help them to determine what kind of changes will be positive for the users that use the product and what kind of changes would be potentially negative so what do we want to avoid most of my work is doing experimentation in experiment design or hypothesis testing the way it's called usually in statistics textbooks and pretty much i'm supposed to support the team from the very beginning where they generate hypothesis figure out what kind of changes what kind of new features that they want to add to the product they're working on so that the users use it more and are more happy then i help them to determine how can they prove or disprove that hypothesis so in that case this will be design of an experiment we determine which kind of metrics we define as success success metrics which kind of kpis we want to move which ones do we not want to move so like what do we want to not be affected negatively we also work on maybe slicing the feature and first releasing an mvp to get some learnings and figure out how we can improve it in the next iteration then i help developers to define what kind of tracking so data gathering we need to do for this feature then i uh help the pm to decide for how long we're going to run it so if this is based on the size of the user base that we have and the metric that we want to effect so this is like regular statistical sample size calculation that we need to do and there are a lot of things that come into play like how risky is the feature how fast do we need results how much do we need to wait seasonality if there's any like weekly fluctuations in the metric or monthly fluctuations in the metric also external factors like marketing campaigns affect how we want to a b test the feature and then while a b test is running i'm going to be doing monitoring of the different kinds of metrics of the a b test and do an analysis post factum this is like a very brief explanation what does a product data scientist do there are many more other areas so i'm an hour ahead of stockholm and that's why i'm starting at 10 am instead of nine normally normally i'm working from nine am to or like around six pm and our company implemented a work from anywhere policy so technically i can sort of work from anywhere but not really there are some caveats to that so what i have today so i'm starting with the project meeting related to user research project that i will be joining and supporting user researchers with providing like data polls to their user research then i have 15 minute break then i have a development talk seminar that's like a company-wide seminar on how to do your development talk and how your development measured at the company that i work at that's going to be a long meeting i don't know if i will be able to do anything in the half an hour between this and lunch i will probably need a break but we'll see i don't know then there is lunch time usually stockholm everyone has lunch between 12 and 1 so that's how i kept it here then there is a really interesting part that i relate to like no knowledge acquiring and it's an interview of a user by a user researcher that i get to drop in and just watch uh that's super exciting i didn't get to do a lot of those before so we'll see how this goes then there is a one-on-one um meeting with the peer from my team where we're gonna be working on pipelining some data into dashboards i need to see how it's done in the team that i work at then i might be able to actually do some work for the project meeting or the project stuff that i talked about before so i have 45 minutes then there is some socializing meeting and also one-on-one with a peer from a different area completely it's a data scientist that works on a very different stuff for me so i'm gonna talk to her and see what she's up to and what kind of stuff is interesting in her area i mostly do that because i just joined the company and i still haven't met a lot of people and it's really hard to bump into someone you know in the office randomly and have a chat next to coffee machine because nobody's hanging around next to my coffee machine i guess and then between 5 30 and 7 i can do more work but i need to take some breaks there i don't know when we'll see how it goes okay now i actually i need to i need to jump in the call i'll see you on the other side of this day hey good [Music] so [Music] i just had my performance development seminar thing um i think it was kind of valuable now i know the ways of doing your performance development review the company that i work at and and i get i got to meet a few people that i don't know from other teams to just like talk about our goals challenges and aspirations so that was pretty valuable but overall it was kind of long and maybe yeah maybe the time the parts where um a facilitator was just explaining its presentation that they shared could have been done without the virtual [Music] meeting [Music] my superstars [Music] [Music] the user researcher interview that i just had was a lot of fun it was very interesting to see an actual user trying out the product and reflecting on what they like and what they dislike i think it's really valuable especially if you're a person who works with data created by those exact users to understand how they feel about the product and the interactions that they have and overall i really enjoy the amount of collaboration between qualitative and quantitative user research as this company so i'm very excited to see what kind of user research projects i'm gonna have to do later on my colleague and i spent this hour setting up my local machine with the tools i need to be able to contribute to the repository of common scripts that power the dashboards that we have as a member of this team i will need to contribute and fix things and add things when i need to so we spend time downloading stuff to my laptop setting up docker setting up xcode for viewing logs and did a test pull request for fix for small dashboards okay it's time to do a break i'm gonna go to a pickup point nearby to get some notebooks that i ordered and some other stuff [Music] i mildly regret this i don't know where am i walking where is the house i need to go to i don't see anything maybe i'm lost i think i'm lost i'm technically in the right place but there's a fence and i don't think i can cross it somehow i'm still searching i have no idea where i'm going i have no idea where i'm going how am i why am i going it's been i think 15 minutes and it's beginning to be a proper walk now and you know why because on my way there is always a fence i need to go there i think there but i need to go all the way there turn around and then get back there lovely okay the drama continues this what the map shows me where to go is clearly not it can't be where i need to go i think i'll have to give up and find help like huh i'm super confused [Music] ta-da this this this place is it the guy who gave me my parcels was super cute like grandpa with a giant beard and i believe he's like individual entrepreneur so that's why he could rent this place in the very weird spot so like the the major company would deliver their parcels here and he could maybe earn some money through delivering oh my god there's a cat oh you're so cute oh my god okay bye bye oh my goodness he's so cute oh so cute kitty okay oh this is so adorable oh my god okay bye bye okay this is not the content that you came for but this is the content what you got day in the life of data scientists walking around in circles trying to find your parcel uh meeting a cute cat overall i'm not as annoyed by this whole experience anymore as i was but some things in life are just not that easy and you gotta accept it because it's live at least i got to meet a very good cat and i got my stuff which is even better i'm gonna get home finish working because i'm kind of late now and i need to do a few things and then show you an unboxing of the things that i got because some of them are like um work on yourself self-reflection books which i have kind of high hopes for so we'll see how this goes i'm done with work for today now i'm gonna dress up nicely and treat myself to a lovely dinner i believe that a morning starts from an evening before and i tried for the past few months to actually have a proper evening routine with cooking dinner for myself then walking maybe running before dinner if i didn't run before during the day or maybe meeting friends like have quality time without screens without social media maybe listening to an audiobook or reading a book or painting a little bit like it really helps to start the next day fresh and have much more energy and resource to do things so i'll try to emulate here while i'm sort of on the vacation workation and have dinners with myself because i'm not really feeling like cooking or with friends here and um have a nice chill evening but before going for dinner i actually want to show you what i got i really believe in the value of written practices and i got two notebooks um some of you maybe russian speaking people here know the brand 365 done this is and i really like her attitude towards presenting the way she lives on social media so these are the notebooks that she created with her team one of them is 75 questions and it's for you to answer 75 questions that are written here about yourself i think it's super important to explore why you do certain things and what are your values and what are your motivations so you can answer questions like what's the five most important values in your life think about how long time do you spend every day on those values would you like to change something i'm doing journaling but it's more of a free flow journaling on day-to-day stuff so i want to be able to reflect on a more long-term and core things that happen to me and the second one is called good enough i got this one because it's more of like a daily practice of reflection and looking at how you behave and if you are true to your core values which is something that i really want to align myself on and maybe write something nice and kind toward yourself which i think a lot of us need to do being much kinder to themselves it really helps to improve your self-esteem and not be impacted by people who have issues and who write hateful stuff towards you doing these kind of practices knowing myself and looking into myself reflecting unto what i do helps me to be more okay with whatever comes my way [Music] you have to be your biggest fan and when things are really tough and they're really rough and nothing's working but there's something inside of you that says i just have to follow that because you don't know [Music] i should have brought the book with me the 75 question book i want to write something down but i don't have any notebook or anything so i'm just gonna put away my phone probably film a little bit more for you after dinner and just try to watch the people and enjoy my evening [Music] because you don't know who you are [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] wow [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] uh [Music] [Applause] [Music] you have to be your biggest fan and when things are really tough and they're really rough and nothing's working but there's something inside of you that says i just have to follow that because you don't know who you're gonna [Music] know

Channel: Anastasia K

Views: 87,276

Rating: 4.9310346 out of 5

Keywords: a day in the life, a day in the life of a data scientist, a day in the life of a data analyst, a day in the life of a software engineer, mayuko, joma tech, a day in the life sweden, a day in the life of a data scientist stockholm, day vlog stockholm, data science, data analysis, lifestyle vlog, living in stockholm as an expat, living in sweden, working in sweden, working from home, anastasia k, moscow russia, vlog moscow, life at spotify

Id: hbg4EPqtaoY

Length: 28min 56sec (1736 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 23 2021