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I've been struggling with this same question the past two years by scaling up a machine learning team (our job was to design and put into production various mac
by mariedavid 5y ago
I've been struggling with this same question the past two years by scaling up a machine learning team (our job was to design and put into production various machine learning-based products for the company). When the team was small, there was no way we could create a product team (no enough product managers or machine learning engineers). So we started with skills. But it came with its lot of inconvenience: hard to align people across the various roadmap. Some teams were swamped and had a hard time prioritizing. Beside, teams by skills tend not to understand their constraints and way of working (thing product manager vs developer culture clash). Honestly, I feel that the product organization is the more efficient one in delivery and team alignment. But this requires vast resources if you manage a lot of different products (this was our case). And in the end, you can end up with doing some things twice or not investing enough in the common assets/architecture (my team was in charge of managing our data platform as well, so we had to think long-term and global at the same time). I quit my job by if I were still here, I would definitively cut back on the number of projects and rearrange the team by products.