On the Jocko Podcast, Jocko Willink describes the difference between tactical and strategic battles. According to Jocko, if the battle you are fighting is one that you must win, you are not fighting a tactical battle. As a decision maker, you shouldn’t always be trying to win every scrap and argument. Instead, you should focus on how your actions contribute over time to your ability to defeat the enemy. In other words, always be thinking strategically.
In data science, there are tactical decisions and strategic decisions, usually about which data science methodologies to use. It can be hard to distinguish between what’s a tactical or strategic decision without careful thought, but the investment in doing so can save you a lot of stress. Per Jocko, you can use a simple litmus test for whether you’re in a tactical or strategic battle: ask whether this is a battle you must win to achieve your goal.
Let’s consider an example: you want to measure how well your classification model performs for detecting a rare event, but constructing an eval set that has enough examples of the positive class is difficult or expensive. A difficult colleague suggests using importance sampling with the model to gather more examples of the positive class. You think this is unwise, since the positive class examples found will be by construction the ones your model can find, and the sampling will miss the ones the model is bad at finding. You engage in a disagreement with your difficult colleague.
Is this an example of a tactical or strategic battle? 9 times out of 10, this is a tactical battle. Both of you are trying to get to the same outcome: a reliable measure of model performance. The worst case outcome is that you end up collecting more eval data than you needed, i.e. wasted time. It won’t lead to ultimate failure. You can dig in and argue your position for 10 hours, but if you agree to go with your colleague’s plan and at worst it takes overall 4 hours to execute their plan then you’re up net 6 hours.
When you can’t help yourself from battling it out over some methodology, ask yourself whether winning that battle is really going to get you closer to your goal. Otherwise, you might be fighting a lot of battles just to satisfy your ego.
Data Science Principles 