It’s Monday morning, and Dan receives an urgent meeting invite from his machine learning lead, Ryan, with the subject “Urgent: Need to Talk”.
Dan is a data and analytics lead at a prominent organization in North America. He is in charge of a profile project, the transformation of a rule-based decision support system to a machine learning one. The higher leadership has huge expectations, as this transformation would give the organization a competitive advantage by improving the efficiency and accuracy of a number of business processes. Therefore, the outcome of this project has a guaranteed impact, either way, on Dan and his team’s yearly performance review.
Dan’s project team consists of data analysts, data engineers, and a machine learning specialist, Ryan. The team has already done substantial foundational work involving data ingestion, dev & QA infrastructure, etc. Currently, the project is at the machine learning model development phase. Dan had brought Ryan (internal transfer) as the lead of ML model development work.
As the “Urgent: Need to talk” meeting starts, Ryan breaks the news of his resignation. He has accepted an offer from his dream company (based out of silicon valley). It is a jaw-dropping moment for Dan because he is going to lose a critical resource at a critical moment. Dan tries to persuade Ryan with a counter-offer but later was determined to join the dream company. Therefore, the second half of the conversation was about transition and knowledge transfer. Dan requested Ryan to stick around for 3 weeks at least. Unfortunately, Dan does not have a backup for Ryan, and the hiring process might take 2 weeks at a minimum. Ryan was nice enough to honor Dan’s request.