Qualitative before Quantitative: How Qualitative Methods Support Better Data Science

Have you ever been embarrassed by the first iteration of one of your machine learning projects, where you didn't include obvious and important features? In the practical hustle and bustle of trying to build models, we can often forget about the observation step in the scientific method and jump straight to hypothesis testing. Data scientists and their models can benefit greatly from qualitative methods. Without doing qualitative research, data scientists risk making assumptions about how users behave. In this post, we'll explore how qualitative methods can help all data scientists build better models, using a case study of Indeed's new lead routing machine learning model which ultimately generated several million dollars in revenue.