Should We Be More Data-Driven? Sometimes.

When to be data-driven, and when data-driven just gets in the way.

I was working as a data scientist at Airbnb when Covid-19 struck. And as you might expect, Covid-19 was a special kind of brutal for a business that relied on good faith human-to-human interaction. When the world is forming insular social pods, it’s going to be hard to get anyone to stay at a stranger’s house. And so, as you might expect, our metrics tanked — our …

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