[What is scoping?]
- Example: Ecommerce retailer looking to increase sales
- Better recommender system
- Better search
- Improve catalog data
- Inventory management
- Price optimization
- Questions
- What project should we work on?
- What are the metrics for success?
- What are the resources (data, time, people) needed?
[Scoping process]
- Brainstorm business problems
- Increase conversion
- Reduce inventory
- Increase margin (profit per item)
- Brainstorm AI Solutions
- Asess the feasibility and value of potential solutions
- Determine milestones
- Budget for resources
[Diligence on feasibility and value]
- Feasibility: Is this project technically feasible?
- Use external benchmark (literature, other company, competitor)
- Do we have features that are predictive?
- Given past purchases, predict future purchases.(O)
- Given weather, predict shopping mall foot traffic.(O)
- Given DNA info, predict heart disease.(?)
- Given social media chatter, predict demand for a clothing style.(?)
- Given history of a stock's price, predict future price of that stock(X)
[Diligence on value]
- Important to have technical and business teams try to agree on metrics that both are comfortable with.
- Ethical considerations
- Is this project creating net positive societal value?
- Is this project reasonably fair and free from bias?
- Have any ethical concerns been openly aired and debated?
[Milestones and resourcing]
- Key specifications
- ML metrics (accuracy, precision/recall, etc)
- Software metrics (latency, throughput, etc. given compute resources)
- Business metrics (revenue, etc)
- Resources needed (data, personanel, help from other teams)
- Timeline
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