Hey friends,

Hope you're having a great week so far. As you may have already known, we are preparing to fundraise at Staq, so things are pretty hectic this week.

Personally, this is my first time doing fundraising. So I'm quite excited and will definitely share with you what we've learned along the way.

This week, I'd love to share with you 3 things:

• 4 steps to ask the right questions as a data scientist

• How I was blinded by my own ignorance before pivoting

• Lessons learned to make the most out of 20s

Let's get started! 🚀

What's in the hub today?

• Tip: How to ask the right questions as a data scientist

• Mistake: I was blinded by my ignorance

• Learning: Build something people want

• Book: The Defining Decade

• Quote: Be intentional with your life

1 Tip:

⭐️How To Ask The Right Questions As A Data Scientist

Asking questions is easy. Everyone can do that. But asking the right questions is somewhat subtle because we don’t know what questions are considered RIGHT.

Here are the 4 steps to ask the right questions:

1. Understand the problem

Problems are not well-defined in the real work environment. They look ambiguous. They are vague.

You need to ask questions that can help you gain a better and deeper understanding of the problem as stakeholders have domain knowledge of the problem. Our task is to learn domain knowledge from them and combine our technical knowledge with data to come up with a solution to drive business values.

❓Questions to ask:

• Why is this problem important to the business?

• How much is this problem costing the business?

• What is the pain point that you are facing?

2. Assess the situation with respect to the problem

Once you’ve understood the problem, the next step is to assess the situation with respect to the problem.

This means we need to exercise caution in analyzing risks, costs, benefits, contingencies, regulations, resources and requirements of the situation.

❓Questions to ask:

• What are the requirements of the problem?

• What are the assumptions and constraints?

• What resources are available? This is in terms of both personnel and capital, such as computer systems (GPU, CPU available), instruments etc.

3. Understand the potential risks and benefits of the project

This step is optional, depending on the size and scale of your project.

Some projects might just be in an exploratory phase and therefore the potential risks might be lower with greater benefits in future should the projects are launched into production.

❓Questions to ask:

• What are the main costs associated with this project?

• What are the potential benefits?

• What risks are there in pursuing the project?

• What are the contingencies to potential risks?

4. Define success criteria (or metrics) to assess the project

This is important.

You don’t want to have an ambitious project with a problem statement to be solved, only to realize that you don’t have any metrics to gauge and evaluate the success of the project at the end.

❓Questions to ask:

• What do you hope to achieve by the end of the project?

• How much can we save/earn from this project?

The success criteria should be measurable and not be something abstract that could not be quantified. Some metrics might not be immediately available and therefore require data collection and preprocessing.

It is imperative that you discuss with stakeholders what metrics to be used.

Defining success criteria is extremely important as this will help you to assess a project throughout its life cycle.

TL;DR

1. Understand the problem

2. Assess the situation with respect to the problem

3. Understand the potential risks and benefits of the project

4. Define success criteria (or metrics) to assess the project

By asking the right questions, you'll be able to define problem statements to solve using the data science approach and generate actionable insights for stakeholders.

1 Mistake:

Before we pivoted to Staq, we were building a mobile app for food delivery riders. I was hesitant to pivot at first, simply because of the sunk cost fallacy, and I was in love with the product.

I was blinded.

Looking back, we should have pivoted earlier once we realised there was no product-market fit. Instead, we persisted for another month before we realised the need to pivot.

Pivoting was painful, especially for me. It's like you just gave birth to a baby, and now you have to abandon the baby. 😭

1 Learning:

As someone who built the mobile app, I was blinded by my own ignorance towards the market feedback shown to us.

From this painful experience, I've learned that:

• Never fall in love with your MVP. At an early-stage startup, MVP can always change. Be ready for it.

• Be very conscious and self-aware that if the market doesn't care and your users don't use your product, it doesn't matter how "good" you think your product is.

• Your goal is not to just build a product. Your goal is to build something people want.

1 Book:

The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter--And How to Make the Most of Them Now​

I recently read this book after seeing the recommendation by Ankur Warikoo. I was blown away. 🤯

As someone who is in my 20s now (I just had my 28th birthday a few days ago 😂), the book really resonates with me as it shares how we commonly see our 20s as a period to chill and live a carefree life. Most of us tend to think that our life starts in 30s, but that could not be further from the truth.

Whether you are in your 20s or not, the lessons from this book are still applicable for the rest of your life.

Here are my few takeaways after reading the book:

• Identity capital is a stock of personal assets and how we build ourselves over time.

  • When we are in our 20s, we might do different part-time jobs to earn pocket money like barista, waiter, librarian etc. However, these ad-hoc jobs won't likely build our skills and identity over time as we do the same things without growing.

  • Instead, we should do the work or projects that can help us learn new skills (i.e. sales, programming, writing) to build our identity as a person who can add value to society.

• Connect with weak ties (people whom we don't know well).

  • We're often surrounded by our friends because we have common topics or interests, but chances are we also won't learn anything new from this circle and grow beyond that. There's a reason why we're the average of the 5 people we surround ourselves with.

  • Instead, connect with weak ties from different backgrounds. Leverage the strength of weak ties by learning from them and accessing opportunities through them. It's often true that weak ties are the ones that can change your life for the better.

  • Think of your breakthroughs in your career and life, did they come from your close friends or your weak ties?

• Always sit down and talk things over with your partner.

  • Why? Because love without conversation is impossible.

  • When a conflict happens, a couple might argue over it. Without talking things over, they go to bed. The next day, they pretend nothing happened, and the same conflict happens the next time.

  • Personally, I'm grateful that I have an agreement with my partnerthat we would talk things over when a conflict happens. We won't let the conflict stay overnight.

  • We'd sit down, listen to each other patiently, understand why this conflict happens, and how we can make things better. Doing this requires both of us to be fully honest, transparent, and vulnerable.

  • The result? Having this conversation helps improve our relationship over time. Sometimes, all you need is just to talk things over. 💜

I'd love to hear from you:

• Did any of these takeaways resonate with you?

• How do you deal with conflicts with your partner?

Reply to this email and I'll try to reply to you!

1 Quote:

From The Defining Decade.

When I wake up every morning, I want to make sure I live my life to the fullest every day. No regrets. No "I wish I could have..."

Being intentional with my life has helped me make many important career and life decisions. Whenever I'm in doubt, I'd ask myself this question,

I don't know if my decision is correct, but I know that I won't regret it if the decision turns out to be wrong.

Be intentional with your life. You do you. 💜

🚀 Whenever you’re ready, there are 4 ways I can help you:

1. Book a coaching call with me if you need help in the following:

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3. Watch my YouTube videos where I talk about data science tips, programming, and my tech life (P.S. Don’t forget to like and subscribe 💜).

4. Follow me on LinkedIn and Twitter for more data science career insights, my mistakes and lessons learned from building a startup.

That's all for today

Thanks for reading. I hope you enjoyed today's issue. More than that, I hope it has helped you in some ways and brought you some peace of mind.

You can always write to me by simply replying to this newsletter and we can chat.

See you again next week.

- Admond