Tech Knowledge

10 years ago, becoming a data scientist was considered the job of the century. With the consolidation of the Web-2 network, users were not only data consumers but data producers. The need to manage, process and interpret this new form of gold was paramount and as such, hiring Data Scientists became a high priority for any company that consumed large amounts of data. These large amounts of user behaviours, network structures, content, demographics, psychographics and much more allowed companies to understand and predict human behaviour at levels never seen before. Data Scientists were at the front of the data stream process that allowed us to bring “life” to data. By “life”, I am metaphorically referring to Generative AI, as the ultimate emulation of human behaviour that AI has achieved. However, curiously, as in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the newly born creature, involuntary kills its creator. Between 2022 and 2023 over 500,000 layoffs occurred across all tech jobs globally, with over 30% of those layoffs affecting engineering and data science roles. This is not solely caused by high interest rates and their impact on the tech industry but also by the necessity for specialisation in this area, due to the rapid evolution […]

It’s easy for things to get lost in translation. We learn this as kids when we play the telephone game – where a sentence is whispered from one person to another. In the course of the game, either because we misheard something or felt like we could make it more concise and still get the same message across, the original idea turns into something else entirely. This is just as true in Product Development: you need to look no further than LinkedIn to find countless posts where designers wonder how the creations they put so much thought and consideration into come to life in a… severely mutated form. Even if the product will inevitably evolve due to the iterative nature of digital product design, its success will always hinge upon well-designed – and well-implemented – features. Still, this is just one of the situations that has led to the age-old clash between designers and developers. While both are vital for creating a digital product, they often think and communicate very differently. Some tools look to minimise the misalignment between UX and Development teams (Figma and Zeplin, to name a few) – but they can only go so far. A new role has arisen as a […]