Project Managing research activities is hard; the open ended nature of research makes it too easy to meander aimlessly through the available time and budget. Good project management won't help you find the solution to the problem but it may stop you wasting time getting to a conclusion. In the competitive world of commercial data science, project management could be the difference between market success and obscurity. Photo by Eden Constantino on Unsplash Background Some of the history has been simplified to avoid allowing the original project and corporate complexity to detract from the key points. In 2017 we started our first project with data as a primary component, and data science as a necessary skill. We were not creating a new type of model, but we were aiming to deliver a product based on a function for which no pre-trained model existed at the time. We started hiring a "mixed bag" of PhD. data scientists and dived in. 2 main problems started cropping up: It took