How to use data to produce actionable outcomes

It's easy to get bogged down in gathering more and more data, only to be left with the question: what am I doing this for?

Jeremy Howard designed a methodology to pre-empt this problem. It's called the Drivetrain Approach and it resonates with what I know from Product Management: Start with Why. Before embarking on your next data collection project to predict features of your fancy, think about:

What outcome am I trying to achieve?
What levers do I know that can help achieve that outcome?
What data can we use to pull those levers?
Build the models that use the data and levers to predict the outcome.

The example Jeremy gives is how Larry Page and Sergey Brin realised that people don't search information online just to get the right result, but to get the relevant right result as their first link. Hey presto, PageRank was born and Google Is Your Friend.

If you want to know more, read the article or, even better, do the FastAI course, Practical Deep Learning for Coders.

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