Designing Great Data Products By Jeremy Howard, Margit Zwemer, and Mike Loukides In the past few years, we've seen many data products based on predictive modeling. These products range from weather forecasting to recommendation engines to services that predict airline flight times more accurately than the airline itself. But these products are still just making predictions, rather than asking what action they want someone to take as a result of a prediction. Pre- diction technology can be interesting and mathematically elegant, but we need to take the next step. The technology exists to build data products that can revolutionize entire industries. So, why aren't we building them? To jump-start this process, we suggest a four-step approach that has already transformed the insurance industry. We call it the Drivetrain Approach, in- spired by the emerging field of self-driving vehicles. Engineers start by defining a clear objective: They want a car to drive safely from point A to point B without human intervention. Great predictive modeling is an important part of the solution, but it no longer stands on its own; as products become more sophisticated, it disappears into the plumbing. Someone using Google's self- driving car is completely unaware of the hundreds (if not thousands) of models and the petabytes of data that make it work. But as data scientists build in- creasingly sophisticated products, they need a systematic design approach. We don't claim that the Drivetrain Approach is the best or only method; our goal is to start a dialog within the data science and business communities to advance our collective vision. Objective-based data products We are entering the era of data as drivetrain, where we use data not just to generate more data (in the form of predictions), but use data to produce ac- tionable outcomes. That is the goal of the Drivetrain Approach. The best way to illustrate this process is with a familiar data product: search engines. Back in 1997, AltaVista was king of the algorithmic search world. While their mod- 1