Katie Bauer!

Probably every DS has worked with stakeholders who had high expectations of speed and quality and no appreciation for the supporting infra. Visible work is great until stakeholder demands start drowning the folks on the frontline

How you think about maintaining this balance will be specific to your team and company, but it's worth talking about factors that influence your tilt towards visibility or team investment, as well as what stakeholders perceive your utilization rate to be

Impact vs. level of effort is an alright starting place but IMO too high level. When thinking about what work to take on, here are four other dimensions to consider, roughly in order of increasing visibility to stakeholders (probably on an ordinal rather than continuous scale)

First: what is the state of your supporting infra for this stakeholder request? The 90-bajillion-percent of DS time is spent cleaning data is a direct consequence of this. If the data is shit quality or no one has ever worked with this data before, your infra will slow you down

A DS's visible hours will be much lower if they have to do a significant amount of data cleaning or infra set up. This will impact the stakeholders perceived utilization rate, so TELL THEM if this is the situation.

Second: what is the skillset of the DS team? This is partly about subject matter expertise, which has a huge impact on how quickly a DS can solve a problem, but it's also about the seniority of a particular DS.

Juniors need more help structuring work and identifying relevant datasets and techniques. Stakeholders rarely know the difference (and probably don't even know the level of a DS), so it might not occur to them that a given DS really IS spending all their time on an project

Third: the interests and morale of your team can have a big impact on how much effort they give to a stakeholder request. Stakeholders might not care if a DS feels like a project is growing their skills, or if the DS feels burnt out from always fielding urgent inbounds