Organizing for Successful Data Science at Stitch Fix with Eric Colson - TWiML Talk #257

For the final episode of our Strata Data series, we’re joined by Eric Colson, Chief Algorithms Officer at Stitch Fix, whose presentation at the conference explored “How to make fewer bad decisions.”

Our discussion focuses in on the three key organizational principles for data science teams that he’s developed at Stitch Fix. Along the way, we also talk through the various roles data science plays at the company, explore a few of the 800+ algorithms in use at the company spanning recommendations, inventory management, demand forecasting, and clothing design. We discuss the roles of Stitch Fix’splatforms team in supporting the data science organization, and his unique perspective on how to identify platform features.

The complete show notes for this episode can be found at https://twimlai.com/talk/257.

For more from the Strata Data conference series, visit twimlai.com/stratasf19.

I want to send a quick thanks to our friends at Cloudera for their sponsorship of this series of podcasts from the Strata Data Conference, which they present along with O’Reilly Media. Cloudera’s long been a supporter of the podcast; in fact, they sponsored the very first episode of TWiML Talk, recorded back in 2016. Since that time Cloudera has continued to invest in and build out its platform, which already securely hosts huge volumes of enterprise data, to provide enterprise customers with a modern environment for machine learning and analytics that works both in the cloud as well as the data center. In addition, Cloudera Fast Forward Labs provides research and expert guidance that helps enterprises understand the realities of building with AI technologies without needing to hire an in-house research team. To learn more about what the company is up to and how they can help, visit Cloudera’s Machine Learning resource center at cloudera.com/ml.