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Jia Huang
I joined Airbnb's data science team in 2016, two years before the IPO push really started. My first project was building the causal inference framework for their pricing experiments — the system that determines whether a change in pricing actually caused a change in bookings, or whether it was just correlated with something else (seasonality, a marketing campaign, a competitor's outage).
That work taught me the most important lesson of my career: most companies don't have a data problem. They have a decision problem. They collect terabytes of data and then make decisions based on intuition, politics, or whatever the highest-paid person in the room thinks. The data exists. The connection between data and decisions doesn't.
After three years at Airbnb, I moved to Amplitude as Head of Data Science. Amplitude is in the business of helping companies understand user behavior, and working there gave me a front-row seat to how 2,000+ product teams actually use analytics. The uncomfortable truth: most teams look at dashboards. Very few teams run experiments. Almost none have a systematic framework for connecting analytics to product decisions. They have the data. They have the tools. They don't have the practice.
The gap between "having data" and "being data-driven" is enormous, and it's mostly an organizational problem, not a technical one. The companies that are genuinely data-driven — Airbnb, Spotify, Booking.com — built decision frameworks first and analytics infrastructure second. Everyone else did it backwards and wonders why their $2 million data platform hasn't changed how anyone makes decisions.
I left Amplitude in 2024 to consult and write. My consulting work focuses on helping growth-stage companies build experimentation programs. My writing focuses on the same theme from a different angle: what does it actually look like when data drives product decisions, and why is it so rare?
I live in San Francisco with my husband and our daughter. I play competitive chess online (rating ~2100), which my colleagues think explains my personality but actually just explains my insomnia.
Experience
- Head of Data Science, Amplitude
- Senior Data Scientist, Airbnb (Pricing & Experimentation)
- PhD Statistics, Stanford