

Scaling Data Science at Airbnb - uberneo
http://nerds.airbnb.com/scaling-data-science/

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jmduke
I like AirBNB, but this article doesn't seem to espouse much besides "AirBNB
has grown like crazy and that makes things tricky" and "We don't treat numbers
like medieval doctors treated the humours".

Data-driven decision making is a generally dope thing, but the number one
pitfall of using data as your number one periscope is that for anything more
complicated than Yes/No questions, you can pretty much skew things however you
want. [^1]

Along those lines -- the article talks about the importance of _customer-
driven decisions_ , which is something I 100% agree with, but doesn't really
expand on it. It ends with the thesis " _Data is the (aggregated) voice of our
customers_ ", but what steps do the folks at AirBnB take to make sure that
this data is more than pale proxies for voice?

[^1] I'm probably the umpteenth person to invoke this in the past 24 hours,
but _lies, damned lies, and statistics_ , you know?

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jitl
We marry quantitative data from our data teams with a gamut of user research
from our marketing and customer experience teams. We use our qualitative data
to check what our quantitative data is telling us, and vis versa. There's
generally enough eyes on our statistics to keep them from turning into damn
lies ;).

Edit: my views not the company's, bla bla etc.

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digitalzombie
There are so many market buzz words in this article.

I'm comparing this to [https://medium.com/@samson_hu/building-analytics-
at-500px-92...](https://medium.com/@samson_hu/building-analytics-
at-500px-92e9a7005c83)

That was a much better article. Look at me I can throw buzz words! Democracy
for data!

The article for 500px is much more juicy and have great details on what they
do.

Perhaps I'm mistaking these data science vocabs for buzz words.

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raybesiga
Surely one black developer or data scientist good enough to join your team
exists out there, AirBnB. Go find them!

~~~
maest
Why?

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roel_v
I couldn't stand the waffling after the first 3 paragraphs, so I have to ask
to anyone who suffered thought this: does it say anything about how they use
data to make things better for _users_ , rather than for 'growth hacking' (ugh
I loathe that phrase) or increasing click rates?

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JohnyLy
Airbnb is a great example of how date science, metrics, users feedback and
growth hacking have been totally integrated to the marketing development of
the service. Their amazing growth proved how important it is to focus on
people more than numbers.

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mrits
Can you write another blog about data science?

