Mohammad Elteibi leads a small team who are playing with some lovely data.

Here’s his Linked in profile.

Find the podcast on

He talks about how much he likes to learn to do something that he hasn’t done before. And some of these things:

• working with teams – need to have an outcome focus
• analytics for the sake of analytics – there’s no point
• building on top of other people’s work, not starting from scratch
• creating psychological safety (see my blog posts here)
• the power of food to build team
• working in a multi-cultural team
• analytics can be isolating: it’s not always a collaborative thing
• having KPIs that include having new ideas
• his path from food technologist to data analyst team leader
• why the worst data scientists are the ones who think they know everything: the best ones challenge themselves to do better, know context and to work with stakeholders
• his own learning projects, including building his own computer and media server
• why he prefers online conferences
• the importance of understanding a team’s frustrations

Recruitment strategies

Mohammad looks for these things when recruiting:

• technical ability is a given
• are you able to learn?
• what was the last thing you learnt?
• second round interviews are a project you need to undertake: it’s not just about can you do the analysis, but also how you think about the customer’s request
• can you think outside the box, can you work without asking questions every second

References

PCYC North  Sydney is his favourite: here’s the charity challenge he got hit for!

Here’s Dan Ariely, psychologist, behavioural economist, researcher talking about how we value things we have made over things other have made (even when ours are not as good).

Conferences

Mohammad recommended these online resources:

• AI Machine Learning re: invent
• Short python newsletter
• KDnuggets on machine learning
• Dataone
• Some youtube playlists he recommends: Programming with Python, Django Tutorials, Automate the Boring Stuff with Python, Google Tech Talks, Siraj Raval on Machine Learning and such