Clearly state the business problem you're trying to solve with machine learning and your hypothesis for how it can be solved.
You need to deeply understand the problem and rationalize whether machine learning is the right approach. If you can't articulate the problem and solution, machine learning won't magically solve it.
Collect data from various sources, generate additional training data if needed, and perform feature engineering to transform the raw data into a set of useful input features.
High-quality, relevant data is essential for training accurate machine learning models. Feature engineering enhances the predictive power of the input data.