Have you noticed that some business questions are easy to express in words, but not in code? For example, you might want to find “abandoned cart” moments: a user adds an item to a cart but then doesn’t checkout in the next hour. This is not trivial to describe…

Sean J. Taylor, Chief Scientist at Motif Analytics I’ve spent a lot of my career trying to convince folks that taking causality seriously is the most reliable way to drive business impact with data. Models, estimates, and analyses that we can’t interpret causally tend to answer particularly unhelpful questions. When…

SQL is the cornerstone of today’s analytics. It is the preferred way to ask data questions and analytics tools seem to thrive or die by their ability to support it. SQL is even spreading beyond its traditional domain: the quick rise of dbt can be attributed to its ability to…

Every person working with business data knows that you can’t “just pull data real quick”. Tweets on the topic go viral: If you’re reading this, chances are you’ve got a traumatic personal example you’re thinking of right now. Taking longer to answer questions means fewer iterations in a typical data…

If you interact with business data on your job, you probably wonder: with an abundance of data and analytics tools these days, why is it still so hard to answer the most important business questions? Traditional business intelligence (BI) and even newer product analytics tools work well for answering reporting…