Clarkston’s Data Product Management Methodologies Expert Featured on Discovering Data Podcast
Clarkston Consulting’s Ron Itelman was a recent guest on the Discovering Data podcast. As a data product management methodologies expert, he shares that effective networks happen when we are able to remove the boundaries between systems and people for better alignment. Ron is passionate about helping teams unlock their potential for “thinking in networks;” he explains that this happens when there is complete alignment of software engineering, design, and data science teams. Ron and the host discuss product design, semantics, the problem of conflicting definitions, and the need to bring different people together for better collaboration and learning. Read a few quotes from Ron below, and listen to the full podcast here.
November 10, 2022 | Durham, NC
Thinking in Networks
“So this concept of how do we architect, how do we build, how do we design? There needs to be a formal process to literally get people on the same page. And this is a product management problem, I believe. And. That’s the world. That’s exciting to me because it seems like a wide open field. This I don’t think this has done well, so I wanna dive more into it, but I could talk, forever.”
“I think it’s important we have a methodology a product management methodology that we can give to the C levels that they can tell their management, especially middle management, to follow this playbook.”
“So the structure of meaning, even though it’s happening inside of us, is preserved somehow and transferred through bits and data, and this is this wonderful weird world of concepts and experiences, right? And in computational psychometrics, we have to. Predict what is that other person’s model of a house? Because we can’t get in that person’s brain. So we have to be able to model other people’s models of concepts. is like magic to me. I can’t believe I get to work What’s knowledge? Okay. Knowledge is when there’s a problem to solve, and then we have to take our concepts and operationalize them in the experience plane to solve a problem. in education, we call those learning”
“The best analogy I have is think of synchronicity, specifically. Think of a band. If you’re going to go to a concert after a hard day’s work, and the band is not playing in the same key and they’re not playing in the same time. It’s just gonna sound like noise. Your employees and your organization they’re like musicians. The information flow, the data flowing through all your systems is like the music. Focus on getting synchronicity between your teams. Get them to play the same scales and in the same tempo together. And you will have a far more efficient system to do that, right? They will be able to create and collaborate together, but none of that is possible. , they might be great individually, but it’s gonna all be noise until you get them aligned. And that’s really the philosophy is I think of an organization in terms of really synchronicity.”