- [Instructor] So what does your AI squad look like?
The product owner is like a business analyst.
They would've got the sponsorship from the management team
and are responsible for setting the priorities
for the AI squad and what results are acceptable
for the business.
So they'll provide any updates to the management team
about the project, working closely with the scrum master
and the data scientist.
Now, if the team needs any clarification
about what the goals are and what's important
the product owner is the person to come to.
They will work very closely with the data scientist.
Don't get caught up with the different titles.
If you have a very small organization
and you don't have someone who is exclusively
a business analyst, then your product owner
is the person who has got sponsorship for the project
and can make decisions on behalf of the business.
In certain environments, you could even have a senior
data scientist who is very well-versed with the business
performing the role of a product owner.
An AI project has a couple of stakeholders.
The product owner has responsibility to the management team
who provided the funding for the project.
And another potential stakeholder or customer
are the current platform support team.
The scrum team are the people that do the work
and are responsible for delivering the work.
This doesn't mean that they have to be engineers
or developers.
I've worked on health-based AI projects where clinicians
were part of the scrum team.
So they helped provide the development team
with specialized knowledge and helped interpret health data.
The scrum team should be able to self-organize
so that they can make decisions to get work done.
Now, the scrum team are typically made up of at least
one data scientist, a data engineer,
a machine learning developer, and someone
from the platform support team.
The role of the platform support engineer
is to be the one who understands how the current system
in production works and can embed any AI models
into the current system.
So the requirement of a platform engineer
is someone who works and maintains the current
production system on a daily basis.
The role of the data engineer is to ingest the data
and make it available for the data scientist to work on.
The data scientist will probably have to pre-process
the data and get it into a format where they can try it
with different machine learning models.
The machine learning developer helps the data scientist
to code and create the model.
Now, if you're a smaller organization
and don't have a data engineer, then it's likely
that the platform support engineer can get you
the required data from the current production system
and can work together with the data scientist.
The scrum master's role is to ensure that the scrum team
are able to get work done.
They help the scrum team self-organize, focus on outcomes,
and manage blockers.
In practical terms, this means that they help
the product owner define value and the scrum team
deliver value and work better together.
So the scrum master helps the product owner
by planning the work with the team and breaks down
that work to deliver the most effective outcomes.
In smaller organizations, you might even have a single
data scientist covering the additional roles
of a machine learning developer and the data engineer.
We look at the scrum methodology next.
But one of the reasons why I have seen it work well
is that because they're working together
and can self-organize, they can break the project down
into tasks which anyone who has the skills can fulfill.
Obviously, this isn't always possible.
So if you're working with large amounts of data
and a Hadoop cluster then you will typically require
a data engineer who has these skills.
I would also recommend having more than one person
who understands what is being done on the AI side.
So this means a data scientist
and a machine learning developer or two data scientists.
This way, if one of this team was to leave,
AI development can still continue and you don't need
to wait for a new hire.
Now that we've got a good idea of who makes up
the AI squad, let's see how they can work together.