Barbara Sobkowiak is a data scientist by profession, a GIS specialist by education, and a manager by passion. Her professional daily life combines soft and technical skills: analyzing data and requirements, searching for the best solutions, and supporting and managing the team.

Her career path traces an evolution from GIS through SQL and business intelligence into data science leadership, and along the way she has delivered applied machine learning in areas such as mental health monitoring and demand forecasting. That hands-on grounding shapes how she thinks about building teams. She speaks and writes candidly about the decisions leaders get wrong: misleading job ads, job descriptions that miss what managerial roles actually need, and confusion about what being hands-on really means for a manager, from high-level understanding to code review and deliberate time allocation.

Barbara is a practical voice on hiring and role design, covering when to hire a deep technical expert versus a manager-plus-generalist setup, how to run feasibility checks on data quality and baselines before committing to machine learning, and how to measure impact with KPIs and client discovery. On the team side, she champions learning plans, pairing, and thoughtful project prioritization, with attention to model monitoring long after launch.