DPL Reading List – December 9, 2016
Here are some of the articles we’ve been reading around this office this week.
Why It’s So Hard for Us to Visualize Uncertainty (Thanks to Brian Zimmer for recommending this article) – “As data science becomes more and more important for companies, managers are starting to deal with types of data that show multiple possible outcomes, where there is statistical uncertainty and data uncertainty that they have to communicate to their bosses. If they don’t help their bosses understand the uncertainty, they will look at their charts and say that’s the answer when it’s only the likelihood. It’s okay to focus on what is most likely, but you don’t want to forgo showing the range of possible outcomes.”
Full-stack development is alive and well. And for good reasons. – “In recent years, we started drawing two separate career paths for developers: front-end and back-end. But we often forget about the third option — full-stack. Full-stack development has been around for quite a while. It used to just be called “development.” But due to increasing complexity, our user interfaces are now decoupled from much of the logic behind them. We now have the two distinct worlds of front-end and back-end development.”
The Evolving Product Manager Role (Thanks to Jarrod Wubbels for recommending this article) – “Where is Product Management going? What do the “best” do differently? Here are the trends I see in forward thinking product development teams.”
Diversity in Startups: Why the inclusion of women should be a Day One priority – “If you’re about to launch a startup or your company is in its early stages, now is the time to begin implementing gender diversity measures. It’s never too late to begin, but the process gets tougher the more uniformity has been ingrained in company culture and structures, so it’s shrewd to start as you mean to go on.”
Facebook’s advice to students interested in artificial intelligence – “Math. Math. Oh and perhaps some more math. That’s the gist of the advice to students interested in AI from Facebook’s Yann LeCun and Joaquin Quiñonero Candela who run the company’s Artificial Intelligence Lab and Applied Machine Learning group respectively.”
The code I’m still ashamed of (Thanks to Jarrod Wubbels for recommending this article) – “We’re approaching a time where software will drive the vehicle that transports your family to soccer practice. There are already AI programs that help doctors diagnose disease. It’s not hard to imagine them recommending prescription drugs soon, too. The more software continues to take over every aspect of our lives, the more important it will be for us to take a stand and ensure that our ethics are ever-present in our code.”
The Product Manager vs. The Strategist (Thanks to Cat Nyberg for recommending this article) – “[Product Managers] and strategists see things through different lens and maintain often-opposing priorities. But they’re actually two halves of a functional whole: to address the range of challenges modern markets present, both perspectives are necessary to win and keep winning. Most companies value one or the other, and keep the two worlds separate. In such a system, PMs and strategists provide competing perspectives, rather than empower one another to create exponential wins for both customers and the business. To understand how the two can collaborate, we must first understand how the product manager and the strategist think.”
