Welcome to Data Science

for Product Managers

Niki Kittur
 Faculty
Niki Kittur

Introductions TAs
Victoria Qian

Shreya Tallam
 Niki Kittur
Professor, SCS, HCII
Making sense of overwhelming information

Designer / Programmer /
Product manager / Founder

Researcher
Let’s meet our TAs!

Victoria Qian Shreya Tallam

Office Hours

• The TAs will announce office hours (TBD).

• You can also ask questions on Canvas, email, and Slack (hciforpms2024)
Welcome! (back)
We are glad you are joining us 🎉
 What is data science

Data science is the application of

computational and statistical techniques
to address or gain insight into some
problem in the real world

Slide credits: CMU AI, Zico Kolter, Pat Virtue

 What is data science

Data science = statistics +

data processing +
machine learning +
scientific inquiry +
visualization +
business analytics +
big data +
…
Slide credits: CMU AI, Zico Kolter, Pat Virtue
 What is data science

Slide credits: CMU AI, Zico Kolter, Pat Virtue

What is data science

Great product
managers are =
data scientists
There is more data than ever before

More data sent across the internet

every second than stored in the entire
internet 20 years ago
Walmart collects > 2.5 petabytes of
data every hour from customer
transactions
From gut feelings to data-backed decisions

Companies that leverage data-driven

decision making are 5% more
productive and 6% more profitable
than their competitors
McKinsey
Understand customer needs
Netflix uses data to personalize and create content

There are 33 million different versions

of Netflix
– Joris Evers, Netflix
Understand customer needs
Data-driven user personas and marketing

Companies making decisions based on

data improve marketing return on
investment by 15-20%

– McKinsey
Build what users need
Data-informed product decisions

“…[W]e decided to let our community solve the problem

for us. Using a rich dataset comprised of guest and host
interactions, we build a model that estimated a conditional
probability of booking in a location, given where the
person searched. A search for ‘San Francisco’ would thus
skew toward neighborhoods where people who also search
for San Francisco typically wind up booking, for example
the Mission District or Lower Haight.”

– Riley Newman, AirBnB former head of data science

Build what users need
A/B testing

Which of these led to a 52% increase in conversion rate?

Measure key performance indicators
What is the north star of your product?

Nights booked Connected 7 friends

Measure key performance indicators
Retention curves

https://browsee.io/blog/10-magic-metrics-for-product-market-fit-conversions-and-customer-retention/
Course Goals
By the end of this course you should be able to

1. Answer important PM questions using data

• Understand user behavior

• Decide what features to build
• Calculate key metrics

2. Wrangle, explore, and explain datasets using interactive data science tools
Data Management
Collecting, Wrangling
Data Science Tools
Tableau, Jupyter, Python
What we expect from you

• The class will involve programming and debugging. We will start using Python in-
class on Wednesday
• There any no exams or required readings

• There will be 3 assignments, each totaling to 80% of your final grade

• Assignments have bonus points for those who already have a lot of prior knowledge
and want more advanced opportunities
• Participation will comprise the remaining 20%. We expect you to come to class,
actively participate in the course and learn
Weekly schedule

• Monday: Lecture & theory (Instructor-led)

• Wednesday: Labs & doing (TA-led)

2-week modules

[Not including this intro week, which includes an intro to jupyter & python lab]

• Module 1: Understanding user behavior

•
Data visualization, tableau, basic statistics, clustering

• Module 2: Deciding what features to build

•
Survey analysis, NLP, qualitative coding

• Module 3: Calculating key performance indicators

•
KPIs such as retention, dau/wau, LTV:CAC, picking a north star

• Last lab of each module is homework-helping lab

Analyzing real data

• We will use real data from Skeema, a tab manager chrome extension that we spun out
of CMU, ~10k users, 1M+ tabs saved/resumed

• The original Skeema is no longer under development and so we can use data from it
for analyses and educational purposes

• Data has been anonymized and in some places cleaned up and augmented to fit the
class
Introduction to Skeema

https://www.loom.com/share/9c56fa06bd264f73b3ec33240fd0fae1
This week

• Come to lab on Wednesday with your laptop charged & ready

• Sign into Slack (https://join.slack.com/t/hciforpms2024/shared_invite/zt-2duw7mqpj-

NcstNrdkA7oobAeap433wA)

• Any questions, ask on Slack