How poor stakeholder management ruins analytics | by Robert Yi | Jun,…

Why taking ownership of the analyst-stakeholder interface can instantly make your life better and your work more impactful

You’ve just started a new role as an analyst. You’re excited to get insider access to data about, say, cat furniture — an industry you’re deeply passionate about. Your first request comes in: an executive wants to know how many kinds of litter boxes they carry. Eager to please, you pull the data. “Perfect! Could you also pull the number of cat beds?” You realize it’d be more efficient to just create a dashboard for her, so you make one. The executive is ecstatic, and you feel like you’ve done well, advancing the data-driven credo.

Later, you find out that those numbers were used to support an argument about which categories should be put on the homepage. You recoil. Those numbers were not meant to be used in that way, and you can think of a dozen other ways to come up with more optimal…