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08/14/14 | Uncategorized

Jawbone’s Monica Rogati Will Teach You “How To” Leverage Data to Build Products

The VP of Data at Jawbone knows that meeting users’ expectations also makes for great data science.

By Betsy Mikel (Editor, Women 2.0)

Which do you think is harder to find: a unicorn or a data scientist?

It’s not a trick question. The answer? You’ll probably stumble across a unicorn in the wild before you do a data scientist. It’s hard to find a data scientist — really hard.

The rare skillset for this job requires equal parts left brain and right brain. Though many data scientists have backgrounds in statistics, biostatistics, particle physics or computer science, there’s more to this job than creating complicated algorithms to solve problems with data. They must not only have a passion for digging into data, but also for manipulating it creatively. Data scientists also need to work closely with non-technical colleagues and stakeholders who don’t typically “speak” data. They need to tell stories with data.

Monica RogatiThough it can be tricky to track down a data scientist, we’ve done just that. Monica Rogati, the first VP of Data at Jawbone, will be presenting the opening keynote on Day 2 at our “How To Conference”! She’ll talk to us about How to Build Data Products for Data Natives.

“The data-native revolution is on the rise as the appetite for data-driven products keeps growing stronger,” Monica said in a blog post titled The Rise of the Data Natives for re/code. “From connected homes to wearables, people expect their lives to be better, richer and easier due to an explosion of networked devices (50 billion of them by 2020, according to Cisco).”

Monica been data sciencing for longer than most people have even known such a job existed. At Jawbone — one of the leaders in the wearable tech space with one of the first wristband trackers to market — Monica develops data-driven products that promote a healthier lifestyle and finds stories about sleep, movement and food in the UP wristband data. She built a team that’s contributing to the tech revolution that’s demystifying data for the average consumer. Iinsights from personal data has incentivized more people to sleep, eat and exercise better.

The work Monica, her team at Jawbone and other data scientists do helps consumers and businesses alike actually get excited about data and make smarter decisions based on it.

“Part of the duty of a Data Scientist is to promote the data-driven culture,” Monica told Forbes in an interview a few years ago. “The way to do that is by exposing the data and making it relevant to everyone in the company, and showing them what you can do with it.”

Before Jawbone, Monica was one of the first to join LinkedIn’s data scientist team in 2008. There she helped build features that we know so well today on LinkedIn, but were completely new ideas at the time. Using machine learning to build recommender systems, Monica built the first version of Talent Match (matching candidates to jobs) and Groups You May Like.

She’s also authored eight U.S. patents and numerous papers that have appeared in top-tier peer-reviewed journals and conference proceedings. Monica was named as one of the 2013 ‘enterprise superstars’ by VentureBeat and one of the top 100 Most Creative People in Business in 2014 by Fast Company.

We can’t wait to see Monica on stage on September 30. We hope you can join us!

Don’t miss Monica’s keynote How to Build Data Products for Data Natives at our San Francisco conference this fall! Grab your ticket now >

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