This is the major problem with the way data science is managed in most organizations. You typically have business analysts or other management types queuing up

This is the major problem with the way data science is managed in most organizations. You typically have business analysts or other management types queuing up work that they _think_ could go somewhere, but they have typically not done the necessary legwork to figure out if a market actually exists for the solution that you're going to build. If a business analyst can't tell you: 1 - What problem you're trying to solve. 2 - What a valuable solution to that problem requires (in gory detail), including model metrics. 3 - What a customer is willing to pay for that solution. 4 - What the timeframe looks like for a valuable solution. 5 - How many resources (people, money) the company is willing to devote to this project. Then the ROI on that project is zero, because there is a very high likelihood that any solution you build will not satisfy the demands of the market.