What I Learned from the Best and the Worst Machine Learning Team Leads

While some of us were lucky enough to work only with great team leads, most of us have had both great and terrible experiences. And although terrible leadership can make the team members' life horrible, bitter experiences foster great team leads from the team members -- helping them learn what behaviours to avoid. Technical management of software engineering projects is very established, with multiple tools and techniques at the disposal of a team lead, such as Agile. Meanwhile, machine learning projects, where accurately predicting timelines, outcomes of the tasks, and task feasibility are challenging, are hard to fit into these paradigms. Navigating projects with high uncertainty at every step requires skills and knowledge that machine learning team leads need to gain through experience.