This is one of the better descriptions, I have seen, for what a data scientist does.
They must find interesting, novel, and useful insights about the real world in the data. And they must turn those insights into products and services, and deliver those products and services at a profit.
Notice, data scientists don’t just need to find insights in data. They also need create profitable products from that insight. I often times feel that data products are not seen as important as improving the machine learning algorithms, but the data products really are the end goal.
The quote came from the Harvard Business Review article, To Work with Data, You Need a Lab and a Factory.