You don’t have to throw everything away

Data science, analytics, and machine learning are all emerging disciplines, and they are different from their close cousins, software engineering and product management for software products.

There’s a tendency to discard ideas that work in other areas and create new ones, like the concept of the data orchestrator (software engineers would call that a monolith - a typical antipattern).

When Amazon had to step up its game and include more data in its decisions, a road that eventually led to its famous Weekly Business Reviews (WBRs), they didn’t throw away everything they knew. Instead, they took the Six Sigma approach, the default approach to optimize manufacturing processes with the help of data, and put it at the core of their program.

Because it works.