In our latest ProdDev Spotlight series, we’re featuring Allison Wang, Sr. Data Science Manager for Core Product at Nextdoor. From empowering her team to turning data insights into meaningful product improvements, Allison shares how data science shapes the Nextdoor experience and drives business outcomes.
Join us as Allison reveals her approach to balancing technical excellence with business impact, the essential skills for effective data science leadership, and how Nextdoor’s values of ownership and experimentation guide her team’s daily work. Discover how data science serves as both the compass and foundation for reimagining how neighbors connect on our platform.
Role & Responsibilities
What aspect(s) of your role do you find most rewarding, and why?
What I find most rewarding is helping my team thrive, from shaping our data science roadmap for impact, giving project feedback, mentoring for growth, to improving how we work, there’s nothing better than seeing people grow and succeed.
Another key aspect is seeing insights turn into actions. As we reimagine the Nextdoor experience, data science plays a key role in understanding our neighbors and customers to shape the product. It’s incredibly energizing to see insights drive meaningful change with momentum.
What skills or qualities do you think are essential for someone in your position?
Great question! Everyone brings their unique lens, and here’s what I find most important:
- Being impact-oriented. It’s about empowering my team to focus on the highest-leverage problems, balancing depth with pragmatism, and measuring success by business outcomes — not just technical progress.
- Cross-functional Influence. Insights matter when they spark action. Building trust with product, engineering, ML, design/UXR, marketing, and more all help us drive better results collectively.
- Technical excellence. Having a good grasp on metric interpretation, experiment design, and technical approaches helps me provide reliable guidance to product teams. It also allows me to lead by example and raise the quality bar for the data science team.
- Team & culture. Hiring and growing great talent, setting clear values (e.g., being ethical, acting like an owner, etc.), and fostering a high-performing and collaborative team environment are key to long-term team success.
- Think long-term by balancing short-term wins with foundational investments — building better tools and new capabilities (e.g., scaling experimentation) — help scale impact over time and make life better for data folks. 🙂
Business Impact
How does your work directly contribute to Nextdoor’s product development roadmap and/or revenue streams?
Our work is essential throughout the entire product development process – from setting the right strategy, to executing effectively, to uncovering new opportunities or gaps in strategy through our analyses.
Examples include defining meaningful metrics and connecting day-to-day product execution to broader company goals, designing and analyzing complex experiments, and leading efforts to deeply understand the behaviors and needs of the neighbors and customers we serve.
In a nutshell, we help product teams focus on the highest-lever problems, ensure decisions are grounded in data and user voice, and ultimately drive business success.
Company Culture
What Nextdoor values do you see most strongly reflected in your team’s daily work?
One value that truly stands out with core product data science is acting like an owner. Challenges are inevitable as we explore audacious new product ideas. What I love about the core product data science team is the level of ownership. Whether it’s digging into why something isn’t working, following through on a recommendation, or proactively informing product decisions, they don’t wait to be asked — they lead. The strong sense of ownership that they demonstrate has been key to building trust with our partners within Core Product and across, and enabling our team to shape strategy through insights and data investments.
Another core strength is experimenting and learning quickly. We take user insights and feedback seriously, and transform them into innovative product ideas. To ensure we are solving for our customers — Core Product teams dogfood our new builds, along with putting MVPs in real customers’ hands and using data as the customer voice to ensure our ideas do work. Watching MVPs succeed (or sometimes flop) is both exciting and humbling. This test and learn mindset is deeply embedded in how our product and data teams work every day.
This interview is part of our ongoing ProdDev Spotlight series highlighting the talented individuals behind Nextdoor’s product development. Stay tuned for more conversations with the team members who help make neighborhood connections possible. Follow us on LinkedIn and X to catch future installments featuring more of our team members.
