The Analytics Power Hour

Semantic layers are having something of a moment, but they're not actually new as a concept. Ever since the first database table was designed with cryptic field names that no business user could possibly understand, there's been a need for some form of mapping and translation. Should every company be considering employing a semantic layer? Is the idea of a single, comprehensive semantic layer within an organization a monolithic concept that is doomed to fail? These questions and more get bandied about on this episode, where we were joined by industry legend Cindi Howson, Chief Data & AI Strategy Officer at Thoughtspot. For complete show notes, including links to items mentioned in this episode and a transcript of the show, visit the show page. This episode's Measurement Bite from show sponsor Recast is an explanation of multicollinearity from Michael Kaminsky!

As the world turns, a couple of things happen: 1) we grow and learn, and 2) the world changes. On this episode, inspired by a job interview question, the hosts walked through a range of thoughts and beliefs they had at one time that they no longer have today. Analytics intake forms are good…or bad? Analytics centers of excellence are the sign of a mature organization…or they're just one of many potential options? Privacy concerns are something no one really cares about…or they are something everyone cares deeply about? Voices were raised. Light profanity was employed. Laughter ensued. This episode's Measurement Bite from show sponsor Recast is a brief explanation of statistical significance (and why shorthanding it is problematic…and why confidence intervals are often more practically useful in business than p-values) from Michael Kaminsky. For complete show notes, including links to items mentioned in this episode and a transcript of the show, visit the show page.

Data does not just magically spring into existence. Someone, somewhere, has to decide what data gets created and the rules for its creation. We would claim that this often starts as a pretty simple exercise, and then, over time, that simplicity balloons to be pretty complex! What if, for instance, you decided to listen to every #1 song on the Billboard Hot 100 going back to its inception in 1958? You may start by just capturing the song name, the artist, and the week(s) it was the #1 song. But, before you know it, you may find that you're adding in artist details…and songwriter details…and producer details…and genre details…and instrumentation details, and your dataset has 105 columns! But, oh, the questions that dataset could answer! And that's exactly the dataset that our guest for this episode, Chris Dalla Riva, created. He uses it (with a range of supplemental datasets) for his pieces in his Substack, Can't Get Much Higher, as well as the underlying raw material for his upcoming book, Uncharted Territory: What Numbers Tell Us about the Biggest Hit Songs and Ourselves. While the underlying material was music, the parallels to more staid business data were many when it comes to the underlying processes and challenges for doing that work! This episode's Measurement Bite from show sponsor Recast is an explanation of the miracle of randomization when it comes to addressing unobserved confounders from Michael Kaminsky! For complete show notes, including links to items mentioned in this episode and a transcript of the show, visit the show page.

If you didn't have a visceral reaction to the title for this episode, then you are almost certainly not in our target audience. There are few more certain ways to get a room full of analytics folk fired up than to raise the topic of dashboards. Are they where data goes to die, or are they the essential key to unlocking self-service access to actionable insights? Are they both? Is the question irrelevant, because, if they exist to inform business users, aren't they soon going to be replaced by an AI-powered chatbot, anyway? We thought a great way to dig into the topic (and, BTW, we were right) would be to have someone on the show who has co-penned multiple books on the topic. As luck would have it, Andy Cotgreave, one of the co-authors of both 2017's The Big Book of Dashboards: Visualizing Your Data Using Real-World Business Scenarios and the imminently releasing Dashboards That Deliver: How to Design, Develop, and Deploy Dashboards That Work agreed to join us for a lively chat on the topic! This episode's Measurement Bite from show sponsor Recast is a quick explanation of power analysis from Michael Kaminsky! For complete show notes, including links to items mentioned in this episode and a transcript of the show, visit the show page.

Imagine a world where business users simply fire up their analytics AI tool, ask for some insights, and get a clear and accurate response in return. That's the dream, isn't it? Is it just around the corner, or is it years away? Or is that vision embarrassingly misguided at its core? The very real humans who responded to our listener survey wanted to know where and how AI would be fitting into the analyst's toolkit, and, frankly, so do we! Maybe they (and you!) can fire up ol' Claude and ask it to analyze this episode with Juliana Jackson from the Standard Deviation podcast and Beyond the Mean Substack to find out! For complete show notes, including links to items mentioned in this episode and a transcript of the show, visit the show page.

Product managers for BI platforms have it easy. They "just" need to have the dev team build a tool that gives all types of users access to all of the data they should be allowed to see in a way that is quick, simple, and clear while preventing them from pulling data that can be misinterpreted. Of course, there are a lot of different types of users—from the C-level executive who wants ready access to high-level metrics all the way to the analyst or data scientist who wants to drop into a SQL flow state to everyone in between. And sometimes the tool needs to provide structured dashboards, while at other times it needs to be a mechanism for ad hoc analysis. Maybe the product manager's job is actually…impossible? Past Looker CAO and current Omni CEO Colin Zima joined this episode for a lively discussion on the subject! For complete show notes, including links to items mentioned in this episode and a transcript of the show, visit the show page.

Synthetic data: it's a fascinating topic that sounds like science fiction but is rapidly becoming a practical tool in the data landscape. From machine learning applications to safeguarding privacy, synthetic data offers a compelling alternative to real-world datasets that might be incomplete or unwieldy. With the help of Winston Li, founder of Arima, a startup specializing in synthetic data and marketing mix modelling, we explore how this artificial data is generated, where its strengths truly lie, and the potential pitfalls to watch out for! For complete show notes, including links to items mentioned in this episode and a transcript of the show, visit the show page.

No matter how simple a metric's name makes it sound, the details are often downright devilish. What is a website visit? What is revenue? What is a customer? Go one level deeper with a metric like customer acquisition cost (CAC) or customer lifetime value (CLV or LTV, depending on how you acronym), and things can get messy in a hurry. In some cases, there are multiple "right" definitions, depending on how the metric is being used. In some cases, there are incentive structures to thumb the definitional scale one way or another. In some cases, a hastily made choice becomes a well-established, yet misguided, norm. In some cases, public companies simply throw their hands up and stop reporting a key metric! Dan McCarthy, Associate Professor of Marketing at the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland, spends a lot of time and thought culling through public filings and disclosures therein trying to make sense of metric definitions, so he was a great guest to have to dig into the topic! For complete show notes, including links to items mentioned in this episode and a transcript of the show, visit the show page.