There is a huge difference in working with a team that you know will be with you for only a single project and a team that you know will be with you for still many more. When you're working with a team that you know will be with you for a long time, you may... Continue Reading →
Ship Already
I've written about shipping before: the act of delivering a product; an article; a report; a piece of art. You can have the best ideas in the world, but if you don't ship, they're worth as much a ton of gold at the bottom of a rubbish heap. "We don't know if the data's 100% right -... Continue Reading →
The Loss of Sales Conversion “Efficiency”
Let me admit right off the bat that the post today contains less original thought of mine and more myself reminding my future self on a fact I always intuitively knew about but never saw documented anywhere: that in a sales funnel, an increase of in an earlier stage of the funnel quite naturally lends... Continue Reading →
Expensive Software and Consultants
They took our data, ran it through their software, and they got the answers that eluded us for so long. I was told they were a big consulting company, which meant they probably had great, restrictively expensive software that could do the job. That's why. But I don't buy that argument. Great software needn't be... Continue Reading →
Business Implications of Analysis
"And," she said, "we found that the more rooms a hotel has, the higher the positive rating." I was at NUS (National University of Singapore) in my Master's class -- listening to my peers present their analysis on the relationship between hotel class (e.g. budget, mid-scale and luxury) and the ratings of several key attributes... Continue Reading →
On Hiring for the Long Term
This was something I read in a book called The Art of Scalability, something I believe I'd always intuitively known but never had spelt out explicitly: that having additional hands (or brains) does not necessarily equate to a proportional increase of output - it is often less, especially at the start. The problem is relatively... Continue Reading →
Freely Sharing Information
I'm three quarters of my way through a book called Team of Teams by General Stanley McChrystal, a book on leadership, organisational structure, and a way of thinking that's so insightful I can't wait to finish reading just so I can start from the beginning again. Other than the Nassim Taleb books I don't think... Continue Reading →
My thoughts on (sales) forecasting and predictive models
I need to have a data-dump on the sales forecasting process and forecasts. On optimistic and pessimistic forecasting: When forecasts are (consistently) too low: well-known issue that even has a name: sandbagging. You forecast lower to temper expectations. When you do get better results than the forecast you look like a hero. When forecasts are... Continue Reading →
How I became an analyst
I just approved a comment on one of my earlier posts, a post about my possible foray into sales. A post that, as I re-read it, brought back plenty of memories. A post that reminded me how my career as it stands now, that of data science and analytics, is quite different from what I had once... Continue Reading →
Making Measurement Count
There's a saying I've heard many times that goes something like this: what gets measured gets done. And though I completely agree with that saying, I think it misses a crucial point: that before measuring anything, we have to make sure that what's getting done is what you want to get done. After the army... Continue Reading →
Donn, fragments 