Celebrating My Accomplishments & Taking My Own Flowers

I scheduled a “ML year in review” meeting with leadership.

Instead, my role was eliminated. 

On a Friday afternoon in early December, I had a meeting scheduled to share my data science (specifically machine learning) success stories with VPs across the company. Interestingly in hindsight, this meeting had been postponed, punted, and rescheduled several times. I had a deck that highlighted how I excelled as the company’s first EVER data scientist, achieving remarkable modeling results driving performance and answering burning questions for a brand new area of the business despite the added hurdle of building that company's advanced data science capabilities from scratch. There were stats, visualizations, shoutouts, success stories, learnings from failures, next steps, big ideas, and customized AI-generated images.

*record scratch* We interrupt your regularly scheduled programming to bring you this important message: We have terminated your employment.

I never made it to that meeting.

I never got to share my work.

I never got to celebrate those wins.

That morning, within minutes of logging on for the day, I was blindsided by my role getting eliminated. I was locked out of my laptop within 15 minutes and out the virtual door by 9am. I didn't get the chance to speak on my successes, but what bothers me more is that I never got the chance to thank coworkers for their hard work helping me on many of my projects, ML or otherwise. I made it a habit of saying thank you often, both privately and publicly... but the finality of the situation called for a more substantive and formal thanks in my mind. (I have since reached out to many of them. You know who you are. 💖)

I am excellent at documentation, so all of my work and ideas were abandoned in my meticulously organized folders of the project management system. I don't know if someone took credit for my work, and I don't want to know because I would be furious, so I am taking my own flowers now.

Please join me in celebrating these accomplishments:

👥 Assembled and led ad hoc, cross-team, cross-functional data science team 

🤖 Designed, built, and tested 20+ ML models that provided new value, corroborated existing POVs, and/or answered questions

🏆 Designed a living model predicting future performance from limited bid request attributes, increased performance metrics as high as +68%

🕐 Built model a use framework to work around and to fit within the limited existing tech infrastructure and user interface of the company-built DSP

💎 Invented new fields to enhance the performance model with behavioral and demographic data (unfortunately I never got the chance to test this) 

🥇 Collaborated with tech team to build company’s first ever fully automated ML pipeline, fully automating a 6+ hour manual model update, retraining, and refresh process 

💰 Built model ensuring maximum pricing efficiencies were maintained, saving up to $10k/mo per on-air campaign and setting pricing POVs

👀 Developed framework using models to maximize new reach while minimizing spend, reached 20% of the most elusive eyes, totaling over 900k unique and brand new IPs, within 1-3 days on air and for very low spend

🔁 Proof of concept'd switching media buying model from predicting clearance based on rate to predicting rate based on a target clearance %

📺 Transitioned and enhanced proprietary media buying “Al” to include ML models, allowing for bi-directional and iterative forecasting and optimization of KPIs to deliver maximum buying efficiencies

💥 Surfaced issues with underlying data structures that would cause volatility in the pricing model and posited ideas on how to practively address volatility and ride out the transition period 

🧠 Brainstormed hard-coded guardrails to envelope models and visioned framework for regular monitoring and maintenance of models 

🎉 Tested new data products and environments

🐍 Shared resources and encouragement with team about learning, refreshing, and upskilling in Python 

... and these are JUST my ML-specific wins! I have a lot more I could share about other data analysis, data science, data visualization, and data automation work I did for that organization!

Sharing these accomplishments honors my hard work and serves as a testament to my data science skills.  Why should I keep quiet about these wins just because someone/someplace didn’t see their value? 

Sidenote: If your company could use someone capable of producing these results, hi! You know where to find me.

I’m proud of what I accomplished in a mere year.  Actually, just 5 days shy of one year and #iykyk why that timing matters.

These wins are self-evident. It's not bragging if it's stating facts.  I’m hopeful that sharing these successes will inspire others to do the same and pave the way for the next step in my professional journey.

THANK YOU to Krista Gamble, Product Strategist, MBA, PMP on LinkedIn for this idea! Her post telling a similar story and using a similar format inspired me to also share and celebrate my wins.

P.S. If you're my former employer reading this, speaking about my experiences and accomplishments while working for you is legal and protected per the McLaren Macomb ruling of 2023.