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4 PM on a Friday, I’m still reviewing an analytics dashboard from a vendor, manually moving files to cloud storage, running three different long SQL scripts, and, begrudgingly, pasting the output to an Excel file to calculate rough numbers. It’s not sustainable, it’s imprecise, but launch day was earlier this week, and I have not created a Python processing pipeline yet, so I have to do all of this manually. We simply cannot delay any further to understand how the product is doing. Earlier this morning, I received an email from my Product Manager, cc’ed my direct manager, asking if I can provide an update. After a few exchanges, I was pulled into a meeting. The message was clear: we need the numbers because senior leadership needs to report to their higher-ups. ...

My manager vaguely remembers that Sarah from an adjacent group did something similar last winter. He looks through his email and forwards me a deck. I discuss the topic with a few peers, and apparently, John from product had a comparable report last year. I’m sizing an opportunity for a department head, and it turns out I’m not the first person to look into this space. So I review the deck and the report. Sarah and John are clearly veterans: polished deck, clear story line, an appropriate level of detail for leadership, and a clear call to action. This is great work, and I’m sure they helped move the business in the right direction. There’s something missing from my perspective though: why and how did they come to these conclusions? After all, I need to do the work needed for my department head, not the same audience as theirs. ...

“Hey Thinh, we’re creating this new product that can transform the market. We want to size the potential fit for our customer base and pilot the product for a subset of clients. Can you help us understand how many clients fit into buckets A, B, C? These are the clients who are eligible to try the product. And by the way, we think that pre-retirees are the most likely clients who will benefit from this product.” ...