This article will build on the prior discussion about building a high-performing technology organization. I recommend you read that article first to get level-set on the basic principles that we will discuss further here. …

Overview Today we will discuss how to organize a high-performing technology organization within a business. We will discuss the key verticals you likely will need in your business, important tenets for how you run the technology organization and common pitfalls that I’ve both seen others and myself make. …

Confirming the Trivial, Uncovering the Mysterious, Exploiting the Useful — What is Basket Analysis? Basket analysis is a pretty simple concept. Imagine customers shopping at a grocery store. They grab items off the shelf, walk to the register and pay. You then collect all the receipts from your customers and create a list, customer by customer, of what they bought…

Why that student in class who asked your math teacher “When am I ever going to use this stuff?” is probably broke — In an earlier article, I discussed how to use the STL algorithm to break any time series into its seasonal, trend and noise component. I walked you through an example using the stock price for Amazon. In this article, I am going to show you how you can use the…

Making Every Day Decisions Based on Data Science — Its a pretty common problem for businesses to stare at data plotted against time (e.g., sales over time) and try to separate seasonality from the underlying trend. More often than not one can sort of see the trend but its buried within a strong seasonal component. One typical strategy for…

Writing Good Business Requirements Documents — In an earlier article I discussed the importance of segmenting your team’s analytics (or interchangeably data science ) work into four (4) buckets to help you effectively prioritize. At the end of that article I mentioned seven (7) key mechanisms for successfully sticking to your allocation investment strategy and prioritization…

Remember you’re working on a business problem, not a science experiment. — Oftentimes the biggest challenge in analytics or data science is not the actual work itself, it's communicating the results to business users who often do not have any technical background themselves. Communicating effectively can be more important than the data science itself because if you are not able to get…

Generally Analytical Work Segments Well into Four Buckets — I am going to write a series of short articles about best practices for data science (or interchangably analytics). I strongly believe that the primary challenge to having a good data science department within organizations large and small is having the right processes; this is more important in many ways…

Hint: It’s Not What Most People Think — An A/B test is pretty much the gold standard for measuring the impact of marketing spend, website features (e.g., language, visuals, fonts) and many other business processes in an objective fashion. It’s as close to a “physics experiment” as you can get in business. It’s also the source of much…