When I started working, I thought I needed to be my authentic, ‘real’ self at work. I tried to be friends with all my colleagues, putting effort into arranging dinners and hangouts after work and sharing deep vulnerabilities. And yet I found many of these interactions exhausting and unsatisfying —…

There are no technical requirements to be a product manager. You don’t need a fancy degree, or to pass a certification exam that tests for deep domain knowledge. People become PMs from many different backgrounds, often because they enjoy working with people and solving problems. Yet product management can be…

A personal organization system for managing myself and my team The problem As a new product manager, I felt constantly overwhelmed by the flood of incoming requests, ideas, tasks, meetings, messages, and more. I’d end every day completely exhausted, and inevitably would have forgotten to finish something, or reply to someone. …

Do you ever lie awake at night thinking of something dumb you said and wishing you could take it back? I’ve done this plenty of time, often in a work context and especially as a junior product manager. In this article we’ll go over three scenarios where I made communication…

Using the UCI News dataset we’ll calculate positivity of news headlines, visualize the results and package them into an interactive report — (Disclaimer: I work as a product manager at Datapane) Data analysis often starts with structured data that’s already stored as numbers, dates, categories etc. However, unstructured data can yield crucial insights if you use appropriate techniques. …

How to get data from local files, databases, APIs and data access libraries into your Python environment — Introduction Most Python analysis starts by importing data into your environment. But what if that data is stuck in a database? Or behind an API? Or in a bunch of tiny files? Luckily, Python is incredibly flexible and has a lot of open-source libraries for accessing and processing data. In this…

A new paradigm for querying public datasets — Ever wondered how Google is able to give such accurate responses to questions like “What is the median income in San Francisco?” The statistical queries on Google Search are powered by DataCommons, an open-source repository of publicly-available datasets. DataCommons provides a central API to work with disparate public datasets from…

A manifesto for positive environmental activism If you’ve read any environmental news headlines in the last few years, they probably went something like this: Scientists warn that it’s too late to save [species] Global warming is making [place] uninhabitable [Human activity] is destroying the planet Partly this is the result…

Prototyping business intelligence applications with open-source tools — Introduction One of the most important skills for data analysis is interacting with databases. Most organizations store their business-critical data in a relational database like Postgres or MySQL, and you’ll need to know Structured Query Language (SQL) to access or update the data stored there. SQL is an incredible language —…