Why You’re Doing Ad Hoc Analytics Wrong

Before your next SQL dumpster dive: ask why and document everything

A red herring, probably. Image from Freepik.

When I was a data scientist at Airbnb, the most common question I got was:

“Do you know how many people clicked on this button?”

But the curious thing about this question: it was rarely the question that the stakeholder actually wanted answered.

Ad hoc questions like this are an unavoidable (and substantial!) part of data science/analytics work, yet this type …

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