How do you do Ad-Hoc data exploration?

**My ad-hoc data exploration workflow is broken.** It's too heavy and time-consuming, and I end up doing less of it as a result. **How do you do it? What am I missing? What can be improved?**

**My workflow now:**

* Decide I need some metric or insight (say 7D user retention for a specific product feature)
* Find out the out of the box dashboards don't have exactly what I need.
* Fire up SQL with our internal query engine. …

data data exploration datascience exploration insight retention workflow