Book picks similar to
Trustworthy Online Controlled Experiments: A Practical Guide to A/B Testing by Ron Kohavi
non-fiction
data-science
business
analytics
Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow
Matthew Skelton - 2019
But how do you build the best team organization for your specific goals, culture, and needs? Team Topologies is a practical, step-by-step, adaptive model for organizational design and team interaction based on four fundamental team types and three team interaction patterns. It is a model that treats teams as the fundamental means of delivery, where team structures and communication pathways are able to evolve with technological and organizational maturity.In Team Topologies, IT consultants Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais share secrets of successful team patterns and interactions to help readers choose and evolve the right team patterns for their organization, making sure to keep the software healthy and optimize value streams.Team Topologies is a major step forward in organizational design for software, presenting a well-defined way for teams to interact and interrelate that helps make the resulting software architecture clearer and more sustainable, turning inter-team problems into valuable signals for the self-steering organization.
Winning with Data: Transform Your Culture, Empower Your People, and Shape the Future
Tomasz Tunguz - 2016
Authors Tomasz Tunguz and Frank Bien draw on extensive background in big data, business intelligence, and business strategy to provide a blueprint for companies looking to move head-on into the data wave. Instrumentation is discussed in detail, but the core of the change is in the culture—this book provides sound guidance on building the type of organizational culture that creates and leverages data daily, in every aspect of the business. Real-world examples illustrate these important concepts at work: you'll learn how data helped Warby-Parker disrupt a $13 billion monopolized market, how ThredUp uses data to process more than 20 thousand items of clothing every day, how Venmo leverages data to build better products, how HubSpot empowers their salespeople to be more productive, and more. From decision making and strategy to shipping and sales, this book shows you how data makes better business. Big data has taken on buzzword status, but there is little real guidance for companies seeking everyday business data solutions. This book takes a deeper look at big data in business, and shows you how to shift internal culture ahead of the curve. Understand the changes a data culture brings to companies Instrument your company for maximum benefit Utilize data to optimize every aspect of your business Improve decision making and transform business strategy Big data is becoming the number-one topic in business, yet no one is asking the right questions. Leveraging the full power of data requires more than good IT—organization-wide buy-in is essential for long-term success. Winning with Data is the expert guide to making data work for your business, and your needs.
Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World
Carl T. Bergstrom - 2020
Now, two science professors give us the tools to dismantle misinformation and think clearly in a world of fake news and bad data.It's increasingly difficult to know what's true. Misinformation, disinformation, and fake news abound. Our media environment has become hyperpartisan. Science is conducted by press release. Startup culture elevates bullshit to high art. We are fairly well equipped to spot the sort of old-school bullshit that is based in fancy rhetoric and weasel words, but most of us don't feel qualified to challenge the avalanche of new-school bullshit presented in the language of math, science, or statistics. In Calling Bullshit, Professors Carl Bergstrom and Jevin West give us a set of powerful tools to cut through the most intimidating data.You don't need a lot of technical expertise to call out problems with data. Are the numbers or results too good or too dramatic to be true? Is the claim comparing like with like? Is it confirming your personal bias? Drawing on a deep well of expertise in statistics and computational biology, Bergstrom and West exuberantly unpack examples of selection bias and muddled data visualization, distinguish between correlation and causation, and examine the susceptibility of science to modern bullshit.We have always needed people who call bullshit when necessary, whether within a circle of friends, a community of scholars, or the citizenry of a nation. Now that bullshit has evolved, we need to relearn the art of skepticism.
Running Lean: Iterate from Plan A to a Plan That Works
Ash Maurya - 2012
We’re building more products than ever before, but most of them fail—not because we can’t complete what we set out to build, but because we waste time, money, and effort building the wrong product.What we need is a systematic process for quickly vetting product ideas and raising our odds of success. That’s the promise of Running Lean.In this inspiring book, Ash Maurya takes you through an exacting strategy for achieving a "product/market fit" for your fledgling venture, based on his own experience in building a wide array of products from high-tech to no-tech. Throughout, he builds on the ideas and concepts of several innovative methodologies, including the Lean Startup, Customer Development, and bootstrapping.Running Lean is an ideal tool for business managers, CEOs, small business owners, developers and programmers, and anyone who’s interested in starting a business project.Find a problem worth solving, then define a solutionEngage your customers throughout the development cycleContinually test your product with smaller, faster iterationsBuild a feature, measure customer response, and verify/refute the ideaKnow when to "pivot" by changing your plan’s courseMaximize your efforts for speed, learning, and focusLearn the ideal time to raise your "big round" of fundingGet on track with The Lean Series Presented by Eric Ries—bestselling author of The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses—The Lean Series gives you solid footing in a proven methodology that will help your business succeed.
Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations
Clay Shirky - 2008
'Here Comes Everybody' is an examination of how the spread of new forms of social interaction enabled by technology is changing the way humans form and exist within groups, with profound long-term economic and social effects, for good and for ill.
Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means for Business, Science, and Everyday Life
Albert-László Barabási - 2002
Albert-László Barabási, the nation’s foremost expert in the new science of networks and author of Bursts, takes us on an intellectual adventure to prove that social networks, corporations, and living organisms are more similar than previously thought. Grasping a full understanding of network science will someday allow us to design blue-chip businesses, stop the outbreak of deadly diseases, and influence the exchange of ideas and information. Just as James Gleick and the Erdos–Rényi model brought the discovery of chaos theory to the general public, Linked tells the story of the true science of the future and of experiments in statistical mechanics on the internet, all vital parts of what would eventually be called the Barabási–Albert model.
Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship
Robert C. Martin - 2007
But if code isn't clean, it can bring a development organization to its knees. Every year, countless hours and significant resources are lost because of poorly written code. But it doesn't have to be that way. Noted software expert Robert C. Martin presents a revolutionary paradigm with Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship . Martin has teamed up with his colleagues from Object Mentor to distill their best agile practice of cleaning code on the fly into a book that will instill within you the values of a software craftsman and make you a better programmer but only if you work at it. What kind of work will you be doing? You'll be reading code - lots of code. And you will be challenged to think about what's right about that code, and what's wrong with it. More importantly, you will be challenged to reassess your professional values and your commitment to your craft. Clean Code is divided into three parts. The first describes the principles, patterns, and practices of writing clean code. The second part consists of several case studies of increasing complexity. Each case study is an exercise in cleaning up code - of transforming a code base that has some problems into one that is sound and efficient. The third part is the payoff: a single chapter containing a list of heuristics and "smells" gathered while creating the case studies. The result is a knowledge base that describes the way we think when we write, read, and clean code. Readers will come away from this book understanding ‣ How to tell the difference between good and bad code‣ How to write good code and how to transform bad code into good code‣ How to create good names, good functions, good objects, and good classes‣ How to format code for maximum readability ‣ How to implement complete error handling without obscuring code logic ‣ How to unit test and practice test-driven development This book is a must for any developer, software engineer, project manager, team lead, or systems analyst with an interest in producing better code.
Competing in the Age of AI: Strategy and Leadership When Algorithms and Networks Run the World
Marco Iansiti - 2020
Lakhani show how reinventing the firm around data, analytics, and AI removes traditional constraints on scale, scope, and learning that have restricted business growth for hundreds of years. From Airbnb to Ant Financial, Microsoft to Amazon, research shows how AI-driven processes are vastly more scalable than traditional processes, allow massive scope increase, enabling companies to straddle industry boundaries, and create powerful opportunities for learning--to drive ever more accurate, complex, and sophisticated predictions.When traditional operating constraints are removed, strategy becomes a whole new game, one whose rules and likely outcomes this book will make clear. Iansiti and Lakhani:
Present a framework for rethinking business and operating models
Explain how "collisions" between AI-driven/digital and traditional/analog firms are reshaping competition, altering the structure of our economy, and forcing traditional companies to rearchitect their operating models
Explain the opportunities and risks created by digital firms
Describe the new challenges and responsibilities for the leaders of both digital and traditional firms
Packed with examples--including many from the most powerful and innovative global, AI-driven competitors--and based on research in hundreds of firms across many sectors, this is your essential guide for rethinking how your firm competes and operates in the era of AI.
Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future
Joichi Ito - 2016
The world is more complex and volatile today than at any other time in our history. The tools of our modern existence are getting faster, cheaper, and smaller at an exponential rate, transforming every aspect of society, from business to culture and from the public sphere to our most private moments. The people who succeed will be the ones who learn to think differently. In Whiplash, Joi Ito and Jeff Howe distill that logic into nine organizing principles for navigating and surviving this tumultuous period: Emergence over AuthorityPull over PushCompasses over MapsRisk over SafetyDisobedience over CompliancePractice over TheoryDiversity over AbilityResilience over StrengthSystems over Objects Filled with incredible case studies and cutting-edge research and philosophies from the MIT Media Lab and beyond, Whiplash will help you adapt and succeed in this unpredictable world.
Seven Databases in Seven Weeks: A Guide to Modern Databases and the NoSQL Movement
Eric Redmond - 2012
As a modern application developer you need to understand the emerging field of data management, both RDBMS and NoSQL. Seven Databases in Seven Weeks takes you on a tour of some of the hottest open source databases today. In the tradition of Bruce A. Tate's Seven Languages in Seven Weeks, this book goes beyond your basic tutorial to explore the essential concepts at the core each technology. Redis, Neo4J, CouchDB, MongoDB, HBase, Riak and Postgres. With each database, you'll tackle a real-world data problem that highlights the concepts and features that make it shine. You'll explore the five data models employed by these databases-relational, key/value, columnar, document and graph-and which kinds of problems are best suited to each. You'll learn how MongoDB and CouchDB are strikingly different, and discover the Dynamo heritage at the heart of Riak. Make your applications faster with Redis and more connected with Neo4J. Use MapReduce to solve Big Data problems. Build clusters of servers using scalable services like Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Discover the CAP theorem and its implications for your distributed data. Understand the tradeoffs between consistency and availability, and when you can use them to your advantage. Use multiple databases in concert to create a platform that's more than the sum of its parts, or find one that meets all your needs at once.Seven Databases in Seven Weeks will take you on a deep dive into each of the databases, their strengths and weaknesses, and how to choose the ones that fit your needs.What You Need: To get the most of of this book you'll have to follow along, and that means you'll need a *nix shell (Mac OSX or Linux preferred, Windows users will need Cygwin), and Java 6 (or greater) and Ruby 1.8.7 (or greater). Each chapter will list the downloads required for that database.
Agile Estimating and Planning
Mike Cohn - 2005
In this book, Agile Alliance cofounder Mike Cohn discusses the philosophy of agile estimating and planning and shows you exactly how to get the job done, with real-world examples and case studies.Concepts are clearly illustrated and readers are guided, step by step, toward how to answer the following questions: What will we build? How big will it be? When must it be done? How much can I really complete by then? You will first learn what makes a good plan-and then what makes it agile.Using the techniques in
Agile Estimating and Planning
, you can stay agile from start to finish, saving time, conserving resources, and accomplishing more. Highlights include:Why conventional prescriptive planning fails and why agile planning works How to estimate feature size using story points and ideal days--and when to use each How and when to re-estimate How to prioritize features using both financial and nonfinancial approaches How to split large features into smaller, more manageable ones How to plan iterations and predict your team's initial rate of progress How to schedule projects that have unusually high uncertainty or schedule-related risk How to estimate projects that will be worked on by multiple teams
Agile Estimating and Planning
supports any agile, semiagile, or iterative process, including Scrum, XP, Feature-Driven Development, Crystal, Adaptive Software Development, DSDM, Unified Process, and many more. It will be an indispensable resource for every development manager, team leader, and team member.
Google Analytics: Understanding Visitor Behavior
Justin Cutroni - 2007
This hands-on guide shows you how to get the most out of this free and powerful tool -- whether you're new to Google Analytics or have been using it for years.Google Analytics shows you how to track different market segments and analyze conversion rates, and reveals advanced techniques such as marketing-campaign tracking, a valuable feature that most people overlook. And this practical book not only provides complete code samples for web developers, it also explains the concepts behind the code to marketers, managers, and others on your team.Discover exactly how the Google Analytics system worksLearn how to configure the system to measure data most relevant to your business goalsTrack online marketing activities, including cost-per-click ads, email, and internal campaignsTrack events -- rather than page views -- on sites with features such as maps, embedded video, and widgetsConfigure Google Analytics to track enterprise data, including multiple domainsUse advanced techniques such as custom variables and CRM integration
Database Internals: A deep-dive into how distributed data systems work
Alex Petrov - 2019
But with so many distributed databases and tools available today, it’s often difficult to understand what each one offers and how they differ. With this practical guide, Alex Petrov guides developers through the concepts behind modern database and storage engine internals.Throughout the book, you’ll explore relevant material gleaned from numerous books, papers, blog posts, and the source code of several open source databases. These resources are listed at the end of parts one and two. You’ll discover that the most significant distinctions among many modern databases reside in subsystems that determine how storage is organized and how data is distributed.This book examines:Storage engines: Explore storage classification and taxonomy, and dive into B-Tree-based and immutable log structured storage engines, with differences and use-cases for eachDistributed systems: Learn step-by-step how nodes and processes connect and build complex communication patterns, from UDP to reliable consensus protocolsDatabase clusters: Discover how to achieve consistent models for replicated data
Information Visualization: Perception for Design
Colin Ware - 2000
Ware's updated review of empirical research and interface design examples will do much to accelerate innovation and adoption of information visualization." —Ben Shneiderman, University of Maryland"Colin Ware is the perfect person to write this book, with a long history of prominent contributions to the visual interaction with machines and to information visualization directly. It goes a long way towards joining science to the practical design of information visualization systems." —from the foreword by Stuart Card, PARCMost designers know that yellow text presented against a blue background reads clearly and easily, but how many can explain why, and what really are the best ways to help others and ourselves clearly see key patterns in a bunch of data? When we use software, access a web site, or view graphics, our understanding is greatly enhanced or impeded by the way information is presented. By explaining in detail how we think visually, this book provides guidance on how to construct effective interactive information displays.This book combines a strictly scientific approach to human perception with a practical concern for the rules governing the effective visual presentation of information. Surveying the research of leading psychologists and neurophysiologists, author Colin Ware isolates key principles at work in vision and perception, and from them derives specific and effective visualization techniques suitable for a wide range of scenarios. Information Visualization offers practical guidelines that can be applied by anyone, and covers all facets of visual perception: color, organization, space perception, motion, and texture.* Major revision of this classic work, with a new chapter on visual thinking, new sections on face perception and flow visualization, an appendix on how to evaluate visualizations,and a greatly expanded chapter on color and color sequences. *New to this edition is the full-color treatment throughout, to better display over 400 illustrations.*From a leading researcher in the field of human perception who has brought together, in a single resource, all current scientific insight into the question of data visualization.
Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction
Philip E. Tetlock - 2015
Unfortunately, people tend to be terrible forecasters. As Wharton professor Philip Tetlock showed in a landmark 2005 study, even experts’ predictions are only slightly better than chance. However, an important and underreported conclusion of that study was that some experts do have real foresight, and Tetlock has spent the past decade trying to figure out why. What makes some people so good? And can this talent be taught? In Superforecasting, Tetlock and coauthor Dan Gardner offer a masterwork on prediction, drawing on decades of research and the results of a massive, government-funded forecasting tournament. The Good Judgment Project involves tens of thousands of ordinary people—including a Brooklyn filmmaker, a retired pipe installer, and a former ballroom dancer—who set out to forecast global events. Some of the volunteers have turned out to be astonishingly good. They’ve beaten other benchmarks, competitors, and prediction markets. They’ve even beaten the collective judgment of intelligence analysts with access to classified information. They are "superforecasters." In this groundbreaking and accessible book, Tetlock and Gardner show us how we can learn from this elite group. Weaving together stories of forecasting successes (the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound) and failures (the Bay of Pigs) and interviews with a range of high-level decision makers, from David Petraeus to Robert Rubin, they show that good forecasting doesn’t require powerful computers or arcane methods. It involves gathering evidence from a variety of sources, thinking probabilistically, working in teams, keeping score, and being willing to admit error and change course. Superforecasting offers the first demonstrably effective way to improve our ability to predict the future—whether in business, finance, politics, international affairs, or daily life—and is destined to become a modern classic.