Most of the work I've done starts with a business question and an incomplete path to the answer. Sometimes the data is missing. Sometimes there's plenty of it, but no shared understanding of what it means. And sometimes everyone can see the number, but the decision still isn't moving.
The question matters. The data isn't there yet.
The business needs an answer, but the right measure was never captured, the history is incomplete, or the available data was built for a different purpose. The first job is figuring out what can be known now — and what needs to be built before the question can be answered properly.
The same question, rebuilt every quarter.
The board asks about churn, growth, unit economics, or performance. Someone assembles the answer by hand. Next quarter, someone assembles it again — slightly differently.
Two teams, one metric, two numbers.
Both are defensible. Nobody can say which one should drive the decision, because nobody ever wrote down exactly what the metric means.
The dashboard is working. The decision still isn't.
Everyone can see the number. The harder question is why it moved, what's driving it, and what should happen next.
This is the same thread running through the rest of this site — across the systems, tools, and analysis I build.
I'd like to hear about it. No pitch, no deck.