[music]

0:00:05.9 Announcer: Welcome to the Analytics Power Hour. Analytics topics covered conversationally and sometimes with explicit language. Here are your hosts, Moe, Michael and Tim.

0:00:22.2 Michael Helbling: Hi everyone, this is the Analytics Power Hour, episode 185. And it’s great to be talking with you again. We have a lot of little things that we do every day that help us succeed as analysts, and little bits of wisdom or tactics that just make being an analyst a little better, from an email thing to a Power Point or to R and everywhere in between. And that’s right, it’s another tips and tricks episode. My name is Michael Helbling. Let’s meet our other co-host, Moe Kiss. How you going?

0:00:58.6 Moe Kiss: Hey, I’m pretty great.

0:01:00.0 MH: Awesome. And Tim Wilson.

0:01:03.9 Tim Wilson: Hello. Hey hey.

0:01:07.1 MH: It’s great. We’ve done a couple of these episodes before, but it’s been a while, and so why not go back to the well and see if there’s anything new that’s collected in our collective knowledge nets to… Poorly use an analogy. Yeah, I think the last time we did an episode like this was mid-2020, and I think we’ve probably learned a few things throughout the pandemic. I don’t know, do we have any tips or tricks about Zoom meetings or anything?

0:01:33.8 MK: Yes. Actually, yes.

0:01:36.9 MH: Look at that, maybe that’s how we should kick off ’cause in the world of permanent work remote, there’s probably a thing or two people could learn or share with each other. Do you have one Moe, you wanna share?

0:01:47.4 MK: Yeah, so I have a couple of meetings. I think one of the things that everyone’s probably sick of talking about but it comes up all the time, it’s the burnout of being on Zoom all day, so I have specific meetings with my team that I tell them or take a Zoom break. So intentionally, I make the content so it’s only audio, and I encourage them to either go for a walk and listen to the meeting ’cause it’s basically me just delivering a lot of information about stuff that’s going on in the business, and also for a global… It’s called a global sit-down, which is like the whole company as well, I’m like, go for a walk, listen in your headphones, get away from the computer, go sit outside and intentionally, it’s audio only so people don’t have to have their cameras on.

0:02:29.6 TW: It’s literally called a global sit down, and you specifically tell them to not sit down.

0:02:34.8 MK: Yeah, pretty much. Exactly.

0:02:35.0 TW: Such a maverick.

0:02:37.8 MK: I know right?

0:02:38.4 MH: You’re a genius. That’s nice.

0:02:42.4 TW: I would counter that… I think that’s a great tip. And I definitely feel like we’ve talked about on past, not necessarily tip shows, but the fact that from a… If you are trying to take in information, you are gonna be drawn to multi-tasking if you’re really just supposed to be listening. So the recognizing when you can step away, I think the flip side is that if it’s a meeting that you are supposed to be participating, turn on your camera, that’s been a little bit of a tear I’ve been on…

0:03:10.4 MK: Just a bit? A bit? Like a little bit of a poke bear for you.

0:03:14.2 TW: A little bit, and not just for me, there have been others, it’s like the people who are on and are presenting… I don’t know, it seems like there are people who think like, “Well, I’m just listening, I’ll turn off,” and don’t realize how much harder they’re not going to participate because they’re just a name or a static picture.

0:03:35.5 MH: It’s sort of that, “Can everyone see my screen?” Dead Silence. Alright, why do I ask? You know, actually a thing I like to do, not a lot of people… Sometimes people have a problem with it, is have a meeting that has no agenda and it’s just for hanging out.

[laughter]

0:03:57.5 TW: Oh my god, you’re the worst person ever. Oh my god.

0:04:00.6 MH: But it’s actually… I think it can be good. Now, that’s the other thing though, I think Tim is you have to make it optional. So if you’re a Tim Wilson, that’s the worst thing in the world. But sometimes just like we miss the ability to go back and forth and hang out a little bit, and so sometimes having a meeting like that on the calendar is not a bad idea.

0:04:22.4 MK: We do have a few sessions like that, except for starters they’re not called a meeting like for a while we were doing… For a while, we were doing like a lunch drop-in that you would just bring your lunch and like come chat, and we also do an analytics working session, where people just turn up and are like, “Hey, I’m having this problem, anyone wanna help?” That kind of thing. Sometimes actually at the start of COVID, I did sit with people and we would just have Zoom on and work with our Zoom on, and it would be like… I don’t know.

0:04:52.3 TW: You’re sick people, I do like the idea… I like the idea of an agenda for just a… Agree like, Okay, have a clear purpose. Okay, first five minutes, idle chit chat. Okay, from 1:15 to 1:25 share an analytics challenge. It’s just a casual catch up.

0:05:08.5 MH: Unrelated to that though Moe, is actually this thing I’ve been doing called Flow Club, which is literally you get on a Zoom with a bunch of other strangers and you have a facilitator and you all say what you’re gonna work on for the next hour, and then you all go work on it for the next hour.

0:05:25.5 MK: While you’re on Zoom.

0:05:27.0 MH: While you’re on Zoom. You can get off of video, but you ignore the screen, but you’re on there at the same time as other people. It’s the weirdest thing. At the first… I know, Tim, I see your expressions, and you’re like, “This is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard of.”

0:05:42.0 TW: Are we gonna get… Are we gonna get to useful tips at some point?

0:05:45.6 MH: I don’t know if that’s a tip yet or not… I’ve done it a few times now, and I actually really like it. It’s super weird, but I really like it, and I think there’s a couple of things that are happening. One is, it’s rare when you’re working through your day to sort of take an hour to sort of declare your intention with that hour, and that’s sort of what happens is sort of like, Okay, in this hour, I’m gonna work on this, I’m gonna work on this and I’m gonna work on this, in that order. And it kind of gives you permission to do it, whereas if some Slack message comes in. So I would suggest something like that for people who are a little less disciplined or struggle to give themselves permission to focus like that. So Tim, you don’t need that. You’re already the master of focus, you’re able to just do that.

0:06:30.4 MK: Smashing shit out.

0:06:31.2 TW: No, I’m not, I’m all over the place.

0:06:33.5 MH: You’re just organized… I remember my old boss at Search Discovery, Mike Gustafson, who’s the CEO now, and he would have his whole week blocked out to the hour of what he was gonna be working on, and he just had this tremendous amount of focus of like,” Okay, then I’m gonna be doing this, then I’m gonna be doing this, then… ” And it wasn’t like he was perfect with it, but it was pretty intentional and I was like, Okay, I should aspire to be like that, but I’m definitely not like that.

0:06:57.8 MK: I am not like that at all. That terrifies me.

0:07:02.6 TW: Yeah, that’s a special type of… I am a big fan of having a to-do list, and I have lived and died by it, and I’m almost certain that I brought this up on the past tips episode, but I have gone from analog to digital, I’ve had a digital to-do list probably for seven or eight years now, that has been a running list and it’s kind of organized and I don’t enter a single item that I don’t put a due date, whether or not I have a due date or not on it, and… On the one hand, I get that, I’m like, Oh well, you need to work with to-do lists, and there are downsides of to-do lists when you start putting things that are like… That are punt easy things, just so you feel like you check them off. I don’t ever really see that as a problem, but I’ve got… There’s stuff I do for the podcast every week, and occasionally if I forget, I’ve got a recurring to do and I’m like, “Oh yeah, I gotta do… I gotta do that task,” and even if it’s a small thing, I’m talking to somebody and I say, “Oh, I’ll do that right after the meeting,” if we’re 20 minutes into the meeting, I have learned that I am not gonna remember 40 minutes from now, so I will…

0:08:13.0 TW: While talking to people… And there have been cases where somebody… Something didn’t happen, if it’s not on my list, I’ll say, “‘My bad, I did not get that on the list,” but over time, I’ve built up to where I… And I have things that are past due that are kind of… And I haven’t gotten around to adjusting the due date because they didn’t have a critical deadline, but I will set things out for three months from now. I had something for years, it was a little side, a little project, and I kept saying, “Yeah, maybe I’ll get to that in six months.” I didn’t wanna forget about it, I wanted to be reminded about it after a few cycles of pushing it out, I was like, “Yeah, I’m really not that interested in doing that,” and killed it, and we had a case, being on the consulting side, where we’d asked a bunch of people to do something, a quick little exercise and very, very few people did it, and it was totally reasonable. And when we kind of did a little bit of a force-able reminder, all of a sudden a number of people did it and I was like, “Okay, did you not do it because you didn’t value the request or did you not do it because you intended to and then you never got around to it?” ‘Cause that second one scares the shit out of me.

0:09:20.1 MK: Crazy question Tim. Did you ask anyone?

0:09:22.1 TW: What? Why they didn’t do it?

0:09:24.8 MK: Yeah.

0:09:27.4 TW: No, it was anonymous, so it was like we were asking a bunch of people and it went from…

0:09:30.9 MK: But you could have just sent out a message being like, “Hey, I notice lots of people didn’t do this, I’d like to understand why anyone wanna have a cup of coffee with me and explain… ” I just genuinely wanna understand, do you not see value in the task or do you not understand it?

0:09:44.0 TW: The thing is that the task was to fill out a survey, getting some feedback, so about an internal thing, so it’s like it was… This task was a, Would you please… But I’ve run into that with people, and I’ve worked with people who are like, “No my to-do list is I basically work on the squeaky wheel, I wait until… ” Which to me is insanely disrespectful to expect somebody else to keep reminding you and kind of saying, I’ll wait until they’ve reminded me. Either say, I’m gonna do it or help me understand why it’s important, but…

0:10:18.4 MK: The funny thing is, in that exact same situation, I went down to the bar at work one day and asked a bunch of friends across marketing being like, “Hey, I asked you guys to do a survey, the response rate is pretty shit, have you all done it?” And a bunch of them were like, “Yeah, no, sorry, I haven’t.” And I’m like, “Cool, why haven’t you done it? Like are you just busy? Did you forget? Do you not think it’s important?” And that in itself is a very good data point.

0:10:41.3 MH: Like a survey within the survey.

0:10:42.6 MK: A survey of the survey, if you will.

0:10:46.5 TW: That wasn’t…

0:10:47.0 MK: Tim is really squinty and eye-rolling me now.

0:10:48.8 TW: That interesting… No, no, ’cause the fact is I’d have to…

0:10:54.4 MH: He’s like, I didn’t care about that.

0:10:56.7 TW: I have a long list of things that were, well, I will say, this wasn’t necessarily a little tip, this just happened yesterday with a professional colleague, never worked at the same company with him, but we were setting up some time to catch up, and he’s on the West Coast I’m on the East Coast, I was checking times, I put in, “Hey, this date, 2:00 to 4:00 Pacific Time on either of these two days, does that work?” And he responded, he was like, “Oh my God,” he was like, “You actually converted it to my local time,” he’s like… And on the consulting side like, Yeah, we’ve got clients that are in a different time zone, and I’m like, “You need to communicate in their time zone at all times. Even if they’re asking you for something, it is such a small thing to go through for them,” and there are people who… I have had the conversation, they’re like, Why? I just put it in Eastern time or some jackass puts it in Eastern Daylight Time when it’s actually Eastern standard time and I just wanna get really irritated, but I’m like, that’s like a small thing.

0:11:58.3 MK: Okay, I agree, that is a very, very thoughtful thing, and when people are trying to set up a time with me, if they put it in my time zone, I’m like, “Oh my God, this is like, Oh, it’s so easy. I can check if I’m free, I don’t need to do a whole thing,” and I actually think that’s a really nice touch when dealing with stakeholders.

0:12:16.8 TW: Alright, can we do it like, my favorite tip?

0:12:21.5 MH: Yeah, let’s do your… Hey, Tim. What’s your favorite tip?

[laughter]

0:12:27.4 TW: I was kind of running through as we sort of had our list and I was thinking through, and this is another one that may have been done before, but in our pre-show prep, Moe had an add-on that I thought was like, great. And that is like using McKinsey titles in slides, and I find myself, because I’m so often coaching people when they’re saying, “Can you help me make this deck better,” and I’m like, “Look, one thing, make the title of your slide a declarative statement, making a single point. Don’t let it wrap to a second line. Work on the language, whatever your template is, make a concise statement.” And it’s weird ’cause I’ve gone… I wish somebody had the definitive article on what… About McKinsey titles, and it doesn’t really exist, but it’s like such this easy thing that if you make that declarative statement in your slide title, and I guess… What?

0:13:21.2 MK: I feel like you’re explaining this in a really complicated way, it’s just an insights title. It’s like your title is the insight, that’s like… You keep saying declarative statements, and…

0:13:32.6 TW: I disagree. Well, one, I hate the word insight.

0:13:37.2 MK: Ooh, I know.

0:13:42.1 TW: I don’t know that… Well, and yeah, I don’t think you’re actually stating the insight, I think you’re stating what the takeaway is from the slide, so… What is the point you’re trying to make?

0:13:49.6 MK: Yes, you’re sharing the point of why you included this slide and this data, ’cause normally it accompanies some kind of data in our world.

0:14:00.9 TW: Right, but I was gonna extend it to kinda… And I got this from Colin Affleck, and I’m sure she got it from someone else, is that if you have that declarative statement, my fancy words, I guess… But the takeaway that, it does two things, One, if you’re going through a deck, you should be able to just read the titles and say, that’s a way to check your narrative that she calls the horizontal logic, but the other thing is it guides what goes on the slide, and it’s another just amazing litmus test to say the only content on the slide is stuff that supports that statement that you’re making, and so it’s tempting to say… I’ve seen cases where I’m like, “That was a McKinsey title, but you put two of them and you put a semicolon and what the hell were you thinking?”

0:14:44.4 MK: I do think you can have other words on the slide, but I think you need to give thought to the order…

0:14:51.3 TW: I didn’t say anything about not having other words on the slide.

0:14:53.8 MK: I thought you were saying that the only thing you could have in the slide was the McKinsey title. Did I… Okay, I misunderstood.

0:15:00.5 MH: Just don’t let the title wrap… That’s the most important thing.

0:15:03.6 TW: The title is The McKinsey title, then any of the body of the slide, and this is vertical logic, whether it’s words, pictures, charts, I don’t give a… That’s gonna be all over the map. It is in the service of reinforcing that point, that title is saying, “This is the thing I want you to remember and anything you look at is literally just proving, illustrating, reinforcing that,” so it totally can be words.

0:15:30.9 MK: Okay, that makes sense. The funny thing is, I’m also obsessed with McKinsey titles, and I especially encourage our junior analysts when they’re learning how to do a write-up of a piece of analysis, and pretty much that should be the same logic for the headings on your paragraphs. If you were doing a write-up say in confluence or in a Word doc or an email, the paragraphs should all have a title that tells you what you’re about to tell them. I remember getting one from an intern and he was like… He called the paragraph like New Zealand consumer statistics or something like that, and I was like, “What the fuck does that tell me? That just tells me you’re gonna say some shit about people in New Zealand,” I was like, the point that you wanna make is that New Zealand customers buy more winter clothes that are destroying counterparts, and that’s important because it might mean we show different clothes on our New Zealand site, for example, we might show a higher proportion of winter clothes or whatever it is, and it’s like, that should be the paragraph heading and then it makes it really clear and you include the data points and the body afterwards.

0:16:37.5 TW: Which that’s a good example of that on a slide, if you’ve got a format that has a subtitle, then you put the what it is can be a subtitle, but yes, it’s that point that I was thinking, yes, emails, you can just open the email and start typing. You can open it and you can put headings, you can open it, make your headings bold, format them as a McKinsey title and now you’ve given some… You can actually get away with a longer email because there’s the scan-ability, the same thing if somebody scans down like what… What does it take away about New Zealand? And they can dive right in.

0:17:12.9 MK: Yeah, for emails, I’m such a big fan of this and then also at the end, putting the like… And here’s what do I need from you? Or What do you need to do? Or like the Ask in bold, very clear, so someone can scan an email and be like, bam! Bam! Bam! Here are the key points, here is what I have to do. I have to respond to this by this deadline or I have to… I don’t know, whatever the other thing is.

0:17:36.3 TW: Ask at the end versus ask at the beginning.

0:17:39.3 MK: It depends on the email, it depends on the email. I either put it at the top or the end, it just… It depends, and it depends on the brevity of the email as well.

0:17:52.1 TW: I feel like there can be a tendency to bury the lead, where it’s like, great I built this whole case, it’s like yeah, but people didn’t… And then I told people what they needed to do as opposed to the… No, I need them to do something specific, and if I’m asking them to do it, that will be their incentive to kinda read through the why, so it’s a big… It depends.

0:18:12.2 MK: ‘Cause for example, if I’m making a recommendation, I would normally include it, like let’s say I make a recommendation and I have five bullet points, and then I would include it as a line after the recommendation because I want to make sure they read why I’m making this recommendation before I ask them to do something. But anyway, this is old semantics.

0:18:32.0 TW: But it’s a care in the communication, which I… The longer I’m in the space, the more kind of impassioned I get about the importance of the communication, data visualization proactively communicating. If you say that you’re gonna deliver something by X, it’s actually okay to not deliver by X, it’s not okay to let X pass and wait for them to ask, what happened? That goes… And some of that goes back to just showing that you value their time and the relationship with that person. “Hey, I know I said that I’d have it by Friday, I know it’s only Tuesday, something came up I’m gonna have to push it till next Tuesday, is that okay?” And they may respond and say, “Oh, sorry that came up, I understand it, you know what, don’t kill yourself. Could you do it by next Thursday?” Much more likely then they email you on Tuesday and say, “What the hell? You said you’d have it by Friday,” and now you’re explaining what happened, and it kills me when I see people not… I’ve watched it when I’ve been told like, “Tim, not your job to do this communication,” like, okay, I’ll sit back and let it go.

[music]

0:19:42.4 MH: Let’s step aside for a brief word about our sponsor ObservePoint, which is the preeminent platform for auditing data collection across a website. And that’s pretty important in a lot of ways, including privacy compliance. It is, I recently read a nice little nine-point tip sheet when it comes to doing a data privacy audit, wanna guess who published that?

0:20:06.8 MK: Right. Tim, when did you actually just read something for pleasure, you weirdo, ut I’m gonna guess that the tip sheet is from ObservePoint.

0:20:14.6 TW: It was.

0:20:15.9 MH: Well, that’s shocking, it’s almost like design coffee was designed to be on point, but really nine points? What is there besides knowing what tags are present on the site, what data those tags are collecting?

0:20:29.1 TW: Well, a few things. I’m glad you asked. They make sense, but I hadn’t really thought about how ongoing audits can keep an eye out for them. For instance, it’s not just what data is being collected and by whom, but actual geolocation monitoring the destination of the data that’s being collected, that could be monitored, asking whether or not PII is being collected or whether their JavaScript error is occurring that might be interfering with your consent management platform and even confirming the different consent profiles are being adhered to, it’s a short… But it’s actually a pretty good read. It’s called Nine Point Data Privacy Audit and is available on ObservePoint’s resource library.

0:21:06.7 MH: Nice, That sounds actually really interesting, that’s just one of the capabilities of ObservePoint that make it worth checking out, if you wanna learn more about the platforms, data governance capabilities, go request a demo at observepoint.com/analyticspowerhour. Alright, let’s get back to the show.

0:21:26.5 TW: So Michael, you have a tip.

0:21:29.8 MH: I surely do. It’s interesting ’cause we were just talking about communication and that, and one thing that I tend to do is when I’m getting ready to present something, I’ll actually spend some time thinking about who’s gonna be in that meeting and thinking about some of the personalities or things I’ve observed about those kind of decision makers and how they make decisions, and so especially if you’re presenting some data or recommendations, there’s a pattern that can emerge if you’ve worked with people around what kinds of questions might they ask or what kinds of concerns would come up based on previous history or experience. And so a lot of times I like to spend a little bit of time just thinking like, what’s gonna be the impact of… Let’s say I do a great McKinsey slide and show the data, and then sort of I like to take another step which is okay, and how will people likely respond to this or react to this, and then prep myself for… Okay, so if they ask this question, how will I answer it, even if it’s not shown on the slide, be ready to talk about this, this or this that I think might come up. So it’s just taking a little step further and thinking about the personalities of the people in the room.

0:22:42.1 TW: I think that’s key, the… As you said, not necessarily putting on the slide, ’cause there can be a tendency to… You gotta be careful to not think, “Oh, they’re gonna, so let me head it off,” but I will also… I’ve been known to create slides for the appendix that are… If this comes up, I’ve got it. I kinda hope it doesn’t, ’cause it’s kind of off point, but I know that this jack wagons tend… Likely to do this, the best way to shut them down is to say, “Yeah, I looked at that, duly noted, it’s right here. Now, can we carry on?”

0:23:12.7 MH: Well, and it isn’t always antagonistic sometimes, you do have those…

0:23:16.3 TW: Right. I know.

0:23:20.3 MH: People. That said it all.

0:23:21.2 TW: But that’s why thinking through with the response is really good.

0:23:25.4 MH: Yeah, what were you gonna say, Moe?

0:23:25.5 MK: I was just gonna say, I feel like we’ve talked about this a gazillion times, but you really do have to think about your audience, and we have this example at work at the moment, where some of our very, very senior stakeholders just think about marketing channels in a different way, like they have this breakdown that they always ask for, they care about SEM split out, they care about Facebook’s split out, and then everything else can be lumped together, and people like the analysts keep going to them, trying to be like, “No, but this is paid and paid includes Google, SEM and Facebook,” and it’s like, No, what are you doing? Like, we just need to present it on a dashboard or when we do a piece of analysis, we have this split between branded and unbranded, that is what they care about, and they will ask for it, so stop trying to educate them about best practice of what the channel definition should be and just put it in the language that you know they’re gonna ask for.

0:24:22.2 TW: There’s a little bit of a thought experiment on the like who’s your audience, and there’s a… Oh, I’m presenting to the marketing leadership team, it’s like, well, okay, maybe that’s eight people. Well, for this presentation, who is it that you… Is gonna be able to take action. Who is this most relevant to you ’cause don’t think that your audience is everybody who’s gonna be in the room getting the presentation, the audience is the person who you’re trying to communicate with other people in splitting up your audience and recognizing that if you’ve got a clear action or a recommendation or something, they’re the ones that the content needs to be tailored towards. Even if they’re not the most senior person in the room, it’s who do I want to actually retain this information, because I feel like it’s easy to say, “Oh, my audience. Michael, I need to go think through the personality and everybody in the room,” it’s like, well, to the extent you can do that mental checklist, if you don’t know him that well, oh, it’s the paid search director or whatever, that’s the person who you’re really speaking to tailor it towards them and their concerns and what they might ask.

0:25:32.1 MK: Totally.

0:25:32.9 MH: Yeah, I like it.

0:25:34.3 MK: Now is a really good time to talk about snoozing and sending later, like these are my biggest power ups since returning to work after maternity leave. I have this weird… My days are just different now, and I’ve noticed it’s like this weird Parents Club thing where we all log off at 5 o’clock to like you pick your kid up from day care, you get them dinner, get them into bed, and then at like 8 o’clock, you see that the only people on Slack are the parents, it’s very strange, but it means I do send stuff now out of hours, and I am really aware of the message that I wanna send to the team because we do have lots of juniors and newbies, and it’s like thank fox, Slack now has send later because I used to have a plug-in for it and it was a pain in the ass, whereas now you can schedule your Slack messages and I do the same with the emails and I’ll just schedule it to send at 8 o’clock or 8:30 the next morning. And it is like amazing.

0:26:37.9 TW: I will say there’s a tendency for… You’ve got the messages in your team on the kind of consulting side, there is this tendency to be like, “Oh, I’m gonna show them that I was working on Saturday night.”

0:26:49.1 MH: That’s right.

0:26:51.1 TW: What that’s really showing is that something broke down in somebody’s process and you had to work on a Saturday night, that is a shift where I’ve completely shifted to that. The thing that I’m still terrible at is I will still be the jack, I just did it last week on a Friday at 5:00, and I’m like, I actually had the AITA, which I’m sufficiently that’s am I the asshole, which means that must be going out of favor, that’s one of those subreddits, but I was like, “Yep, I actually got this done, no need to look at it till Monday.” And as we’re talking about this right now, totally should have been just a scheduled Slack message, it could be checked off my to-do list, it could go out at 9:30 on Monday morning. That’s the other thing, don’t schedule it for 7:30 AM, you’re not necessarily helping anybody by saying as soon as they show up, they’ve got a look at me.

0:27:45.1 MK: And my sister is like an insane freak with even just snoozing Gmail. Every time I say her, all she does is harp on about it. Because… And I think it does make sense, but she has a zero inbox policy, like zero unreads, which is weird ’cause I always have hundreds of unread emails, Tim would freak out probably too, but anyway, her tip that she always goes on about with me is like if you snooze it, it actually puts it at the top of your inbox in Gmail, but it doesn’t mark as unread, which she really likes ’cause then it’s easy to find. So she’ll just snooze it, even if it’s only for a couple of minutes and then knowns to action it later.

0:28:26.8 MH: You don’t like snoozing?

0:28:28.1 TW: Yeah, I’m not a… To me, I can see myself if I was doing that, I would get caught into this where I’m spending more time like snoozing stuff, so I am more of the… And I’ve gotten better and better at not looking at my email for large chunks of time, and then when I look at it, and I am kind of essentially an inbox zero, I am a to-do list pretty heavily, I’ve got auto-tagging on stuff, so I can file it away. So I do… Basically, when I have chunks of time, I will have 30 emails have built up and I blow through them in two minutes, and it’s either gonna be… If it’s a to-do, I can file it, like I’ve got it as a to-do, I file it away, and I’ve been shocked at how easy it is to maintain essentially inbox zero.

0:29:18.7 MK: I wonder if that’s because email is not that important anymore, if someone has something important to say to me, no one sends it to me in an email anymore, and I know it’s different when you’re… Totally different when you’re consulting, but my email is like… I barely use my email now.

0:29:32.6 MH: Yeah, it depends a lot on who you’re working with. That’s interesting.

0:29:37.6 TW: Yeah. Can you snooze? Snoozing in Slack is definitely…

0:29:41.2 MK: Actually, my boss, my boss has a power tip for this that I’ve just started doing, so what you do is if you have a message that you wanna get back to later, but you wanna like… You wanna check it, but not forget about it. He stars it, right. And then at the end of the day, he goes and there’s a thing then on the sidebar, that is all the ones that you saved during the day, so as a little saved flag, and then he goes through them at the end of the day and un-saves them which is very smart.

0:30:14.4 MH: Yeah, that’s what I do with emails that I need to look at later, I put a star next to them. I need to start doing that for Slack, I don’t typically schedule my Slack messages, but actually, that’s a really good idea. I’m gonna start to do that. And especially because a lot of times, if you need to do analysis or really good focused work, sometimes you can’t get to it until it’s late at night, or sometimes I don’t get to it till it’s late at night, and then you don’t wanna be sending that often like 1:00 AM or whatever, you don’t need people to know that.

0:30:44.3 MK: Totally.

0:30:45.1 MH: Just schedule the send for the next morning.

0:30:46.7 TW: You’re turning into the productivity tips.

0:30:51.0 MH: Well, but it’s about communication too. One of the things I think is important is you don’t necessarily want people to know that you’re working at those times.

0:30:57.6 MK: Totally.

0:30:58.7 MH: That shouldn’t be an expectation, so that’s part of protecting yourself too, I think.

0:31:04.1 TW: We had… It was funny, just kind of scanning through our list, I now realize that we had a couple of related ones ’cause I realized this early on, there’s a video of me from my first Super Week, which was like 2016, which somehow has popped back up ’cause somebody found it. I went back and sampled it to see if I completely disagreed with my former self, but I… One of the things I talked about as I was trying to learn R was how much value I was finding in working in a format where you’re having to document what you’re doing, which is not unique to R, it’s unique to anything that’s a text-based language, which over time, the more more value I’ve seen of working and I’m working in our notebooks, but they’re Jupiter Notebooks or to be able to keep notes of what you’re doing and why you’re doing it, there’s commenting within code, but there’s also writing out the narrative and so if using code…

0:32:08.9 TW: I know there are people who just were just writing the script and they try to do everything with comments, which then you have to put the comment market, whereas if you’re working in mark down, you can actually plan out. And we started doing this more kind of talking internally about, I’m gonna do this analysis let me first write out just a bulleted list in a notebook, what I’m gonna do. Now, I can start chunking it up. Now I can have stuff that I haven’t yet done. I can make the list of these are the things that need to be considered and keeping that running documentation of the analysis as you go, which I think is just trying to do that in Excel, it takes an enormous amount of discipline.

0:32:48.1 MH: Yeah, I write out my questions. Yeah.

0:32:50.0 MK: I was gonna say, some people do work in Excel though and I think it’s fine to keep a notepad or note… When I say notepad, I mean like a notes thing of what you’re doing step by step.

0:33:01.5 TW: I think that’s probably where you wind up, I haven’t… To some extent, yes, document within the workbook, but if you can’t do that, that’s where I’ve seen that as one of your things to say, because if you’ve got an Excel file, then well have another file that’s accessible link to it or put it in the same spot and say, this is my logic. This was this really weird thing is we’ve got teams that are growing and trying to do knowledge sharing, I’m like, I will take shitty and imperfect notes, giving the rationale with typos and everything else over me having to find time with you to sit down and try to remember what you were thinking nine months ago, so working that into the flow of saying, “How am I saving this for my future self.”

0:33:47.7 MH: It’s interesting you say that, ’cause I remember our episode with JD Long last time, he mentioned that everyone on his team uses Git for everything. Sort of like, Yeah, everything is gonna be in a repository, so just take your notes and everything right there so it can all be accessible and visible to everybody.

0:34:06.9 TW: I have referenced rubber duck debugging no less than eight times since we recorded that episode.

0:34:12.3 MK: Are you using it? I’m obsessed. I was explaining rubber ducking to someone, I think maybe it was my sister the other day.

0:34:17.8 MH: That’s right.

0:34:18.5 TW: I’m not gonna lie, I got so sucked into Amazon and the number of different rubber duck options that I basically get shopper paralysis and I couldn’t actually order one.

0:34:30.9 MH: Oh no. Somebody, please send Tim a rubber duck. If you need his address, just let me know.

0:34:37.0 MK: There are a thousand sponsors that also give them away at stuff, so…

0:34:40.1 MH: Yeah, of course.

0:34:42.6 TW: I have one strapped to the front of my kayak, but it’s gonna stay there.

0:34:48.5 MH: Yeah, well, you need that one for any photography questions you might have when you’re kayaking.

0:34:53.4 TW: Yeah.

[chuckle]

0:34:57.0 MH: Okay, it’s time for the quizzical query of conundrums that really test the logic and the medal of our two co-host Moe and Tim, as they go toe to toe with the question that is going to test your perception of your statistical knowledge or whatever. I don’t know, I can’t do too many alliterations, but it’s the Conductrics quiz brought to you by Conductrics. The Analytics Power Hour, and the Conductrics quiz are sponsored by Conductrics, they build industry leading experimentation software for AB testing, adaptive optimization and predictive targeting. You can find out more about Conductrics at conductrics.com. Alright, Moe, are you ready to know who you’re competing for?

0:35:44.3 MK: Surely.

0:35:46.0 MH: Awesome, our listener is Joe McDonald.

0:35:50.0 MK: Hello Joe.

0:35:50.6 MH: Excellent. And Tim, you are competing for G Scott Stukey.

0:35:57.8 TW: Well, hello then.

0:36:01.8 MH: So both listeners and here we go.

0:36:05.8 TW: Are you panicked?

0:36:06.7 MH: I’m not panicked, there’s no run up… We’re just going right into the question. No, preamble at all.

0:36:11.0 TW: I miss the panicked Michael.

0:36:13.6 MH: Oh, you miss… Okay, well, let’s see if I can work some of that in. The classical approach to estimating the parameters for linear regression is ordinary least squares or OLS, under certain conditions, the OS estimates are B-L-U-E, which stands for best linear unbiased estimator. Best here means that the OLS estimates are optimal in that they have the smallest variance versus all other possible approaches for the class of linear unbiased estimators, what is the one assumption from the following that is not needed for OLS to be BLUE? BLUE being best linear unbiased estimator. Okay, is it A, homoskedastic errors, B, normally distributed errors, C, no covariance between errors and regressors, D, no auto-covariance between the errors or E, absence of perfect multi-collinearity. That’s a mouthful.

0:37:32.0 TW: I’m trying to write these down, I wanna see them on screen.

0:37:34.1 MH: Yeah, no, no can do ’cause we can’t…

0:37:39.2 TW: Homoscedasticity of errors. Was that the first one?

0:37:40.2 MH: Yes.

0:37:41.0 MK: And what was C?

0:37:43.0 MH: C was no covariance between errors and regressors.

0:37:46.6 TW: I am going to eliminate the E, the absence of…

0:37:50.6 MH: Perfect multicollinearity?

0:37:52.0 TW: Perfect multicollinearity.

0:37:55.5 MH: Collinearity. That’s a perfect reduction. There is an absence of E now. So now you’ve got A, B, C and D.

0:38:04.1 MK: I’m going to try and eliminate no co-variance between errors and regressors, which I think was C.

0:38:13.6 MH: That is correct, C. Alright, So eliminating C, that is also eliminated. So now we’re down to three. Wow, so A, homoskedastic errors, B, normally distributed errors, or D, no auto-covariance between the errors was our…

0:38:33.2 TW: No auto-covariance… I don’t even know what… I don’t know what is auto-correlation, but just because I don’t even know what auto-covariance is. So I am gonna go with D to eliminate.

0:38:47.2 MH: D to eliminate. Alright, well, your lucky streak continues. It’s actually pretty amazing how effective we are at eliminating bad answers. That means that you’re both pretty smart, is what that means. So we’ve eliminated D. Now it’s a 50-50 between A and B. That’s pretty good.

0:39:05.5 MK: I am going to just go right in there and guess that the answer is A.

0:39:09.7 MH: The answer is A. Alright, Tim, are you comfortable with your answer being B?

0:39:14.6 MK: I mean what would he do if he wasn’t?

0:39:14.8 TW: I am very comfortable with whatever. It’s up to Moe.

0:39:19.5 MH: Alright. Well, Moe. Here’s the answer. The answer is B. It’s the Gauss-Markov Theorem, which shows that OLS is BLUE or makes no use of normally distributed error terms. It is true though, that if the error terms are normally distributed, then the OLS estimates are equivalent to maximum likelihood estimation, MLE estimates. So that’s the description of the answer. So that means G Scott Stukey, you are a winner! And great job. Actually, great job, Moe and Tim. That was a really tough one, I think.

0:40:00.9 TW: Oh yeah, like all the soft balls that get logged out like the last one.

0:40:06.3 MH: Well, last week we had JD Long helping out, so that kind of helped a little. Anyways, very nicely done. Alright, well, once again, we’re thankful to our sponsors, Conductrics, for coming up with the quiz and being there to help us get through it. Alright, check them out at conductrics.com. And let’s get back to the show. Okay, Tim, you wrote down a tip that I also co-sign super hard, which is about taking notes in meetings, even if you’re not necessarily the designated note-taker, and I’m a big fan of that too. You wanna talk about it a little bit?

0:40:45.6 TW: Sure, I think, for one, I almost… Some of it goes back to the Zoom. I’ve been doing Zoom meetings since I promote long before COVID. One, if you’re taking notes, you have to be listening and you have to be in the moment to write things down, so that, I think, is one really important, and the other one is just what I’ve learned, things that seem really important, I’m gonna remember in the moment, even if I have a imperfectly fragment of a sentence, it gives me something much more worthwhile to rely on. I’ve got some co-workers who are also kind of obsessive, and we work heavily in the Google world, so we’ve got cases where we’ve got 500-page documents of Google notes. And it’s just organised, so every meeting is another heading. And we’ll have two or three of us in there taking notes at the same time, which is with a team that’s working really well, when somebody winds up all of a sudden talking, and in a back and forth, and somebody else just picks up and they start taking the notes. So even that collaborative note-taking is amazing, and then when I’m working with some other team that maybe I haven’t worked with as much, we don’t have that figured out, it’s like, I’m gonna be taking my notes, I will share them out afterwards as well, if anybody wants them, but…

0:42:09.0 MK: My only thing is… Because I’m a prolific note-taker as well, it’s like just how I ingest information, and even at high school and stuff, that’s how I prepped for exam is I had to write things out, that was just my thing, but I always find in meetings and especially in interviews, ’cause I do a lot of interviewing now, I always feel like I have to, at the start, say like, “Hey, I just need to tell you I’m taking notes.”

0:42:35.9 TW: I’m gonna be.

0:42:36.0 MH: Yeah, that’s good.

0:42:36.4 MK: “That’s how I ingestion information. I need to let you know because we are on Zoom and you don’t know what I’m typing about.” And as much as I love taking notes, I also am getting sick of having to say that, but I’m like, I want people to know that I’m paying attention in the meetings, so I feel like I always have to say that first.

0:42:51.9 MH: Yeah, it’s interesting ’cause yeah, actually, sometimes Moe, I will give up on taking notes because I don’t wanna appear distracted. Interview is a good example where I really struggle to take notes ’cause I really wanna focus on the person in that conversation. But the other fascinating thing to me is, ’cause a lot of times I’ll get through some meeting where I’ve been taking notes and I’d take a lot of notes, but sometimes you’ll sort of get your thought interrupted because you’re conversing about something, and then you’ll come back to your notes and be like… You have a half written sentence, you’re like, “What was I saying?” [laughter] But what also has been fascinating to me is if you compare notes with someone else who was also taking notes in the same meeting, there are going to be deltas in what you heard versus what they heard, and that blows my mind, ’cause it’s sort of like, well, I was sitting there, listening to everything and I copied and took down pretty good notes, and yet still there will always be something that they heard that I didn’t hear or something else that… And it’s so valuable sometimes to be able to have that corroboration or crossover because I was like, “Wow, I think I’m a pretty good listener,” and actually, sometimes I miss certain things in these conversations, and that’s pretty cool.

0:44:09.6 TW: And there were times when I was on a client meeting with some co-workers and the client was… One of the people with the client was being kind of unduly negative about the prospects of an idea of something we’d been fighting, we’d been trying to figure out with them for years at this point, and I didn’t resist myself, I said, “Okay, Eeyore,” just to base, as a shorthand to, which got written down into… In which the relationship, there was chuckling, but that guy had actually taken down as a note verbatim, so then I got the benefit of having reminders on Slack, like oh, I was reviewing the notes and there’s the, “Okay Eeyore,” from Tim.

0:44:48.3 MH: Okay, Eeyore.

0:44:51.5 MK: One thing… Okay, in a more positive way, one thing that I will mention is that the other day… So me and we’ve got this new head of insights and metrics, who’s a super smart, amazing guy, and a guy from finance and I were working on something about how we’re gonna do market opportunity sizing. And we were just having like… It was almost like a bit of a brainstorm of like, “Oh, should we use this metric? Okay, here, no. Here’s why we shouldn’t. Here’s why we should maybe think about this different one.” And I don’t know how it ended up happening, but we were kind of doing that collaborative note-taking thing, and then I had to put it into a strategy doc, and I almost was like just adding a few words here and there, and was lifting our entire conversation as like in the right sections of the strategy doc of like, “Here is our approach, here are the metrics we considered but we ruled out and here is why.” And I was just like, “Oh God, this doc normally would have taken me like a couple of hours,” and it probably took me like half an hour to put together because I was lifting all of our thinking from that session by taking the really good notes and it was actually a really nice feeling.

0:45:54.8 MH: Alright, Moe, do you have another one?

0:45:57.3 MK: Yeah, so one that I’m actually semi-annoyed at my team ’cause they stopped doing it while I was on maternity leave, which I just found out, but we’ll be getting a revamp soon. [laughter] Is basically we had a label on our JIRA tickets of the kind of task it was. So if they were doing a data warehouse build, it would say, “DA Data Warehouse,” if they were doing an experiment analysis, it would be like, “DA Experiment,” and we would use these labels on the tickets, and then at the end of the season, I could go into JIRA and very easily, and then I would also go into GitHub and just look at how many commutes we had, how many PRs, etcetera. And I would do an update to our stakeholders basically being like, “And this is how many experiments we analyzed. This is how many ad hoc pieces of analysis we did. This is how many dashboards we build.” And it was like a really, like yes, I think task-tracking is really important for your own self, but it’s a way to evangelise the team at the end of the season and say, “This is the contribution we made,” because sometimes your team, when you’re internal, people don’t realise the value of the work that you’re doing. And it’s like, “Hey, we analyze 100 experiments in three months and we’re able to help the business in this way.” It’s pretty cool.

0:47:15.3 TW: I’m gonna take a little bit of… I’m gonna nitpick your language a little bit ’cause there’s a little bit of an outputs versus an outcome where when you’re counting tasks, it’s there is necessarily value in that. I am still a huge fan of it, but I also think even the exercise of figuring out what that taxonomy is, it’s like there is… Getting through that and saying, “This is the work that we do. And here’s how we think about it, what type of a request.” And it’s fine, there can be a tag for other, and do you want that to be under 10% or something. But I think that there’s that additional step. When I track my… For me, tracking time and tracking task, well, kind of hand in hand, I don’t put time on my… I don’t have them jointly… I’m gonna backtrack on that. I do both of them, and I am a big believer in tracking my time, and I’m a big believer in tracking my tasks, I think when you’re trying to track your time at a task level, that can get really cumbersome really, really quickly.

0:48:16.3 MK: Painful.

0:48:18.8 TW: But I do think the… For the analyst or the analytics team to have the forethought to say, “We’re gonna collect… This is data collection for us to put these tags… ” Because you likely wouldn’t get to it if they… You could just say, “We have,” how many tickets we have, now you gotta sort through and hand flag them at the end of the year, that’s not gonna happen.

0:48:36.7 MK: Well, number one, the process was really quick, but the other thing is it helped us understand where do we need to put resources, like which analysts are drowning or which ones are over-achieving, maybe, but also where do we need to automate stuff. If we have 100 experiment analyses done and each one of those is taking like, I don’t know, 30 minutes to run a piece of code, is there something there that we can automate to make that faster because it’s something that we’re doing a lot of, and it helps then inform the work that you do for the next season.

0:49:05.1 TW: Or the flip side, this type of thing is, it really tends to be a really high value thing but the volume is really low. So what’s the question? And that can be the same sort of discussion internally of like, “We want… We’re getting… ” I had a guy that worked for me years ago that we call him ankle-biter tasks. He’s like, “The ankle-biters are killing us.” He had a lot of challenges, but boy, that one stuck with me for a long time that you’re getting death by a thousand cuts. We only did 5% of our time was on the stuff that isn’t organisation, we agree would be more really valuable. Do we agree we wanna do more of these? Okay, well, let’s look at the pile of things that’s preventing us, let’s talk about automation, let’s talk about resourcing, let’s talk about how to say no.

0:49:50.1 MH: I think that’s really good.

0:49:52.2 TW: See, in theory, you can say no.

0:49:55.6 MH: Yeah, in theory. Well, okay, one thing we’ve gotta say no to is probably keep going, so we’ve gotta start to wrap up because we’re running up against the hour here. But this has been a lot of fun, actually, I’ve been enjoying this, again, and I hope listeners are enjoying it too.

0:50:08.4 TW: This was a lot more fluid and organic than I remember the past ones.

0:50:12.5 MH: Well, I feel like they’re all kind of the same.

0:50:13.8 MK: I feel like we harped on about some of the same shit in a different way.

0:50:17.6 MH: Maybe ’cause it’s super important and we… Next tips and tricks episode, everyone listen and you can do a bingo card if we do the exact same McKinsey slide tip as before. No, I’m just kidding. [chuckle] I don’t know if we’ve done that one before or not.

0:50:31.7 MK: Can we include one last one? You know I always try and smush something in at the end.

0:50:33.3 MH: Yes. Yep, last one…

0:50:35.2 TW: This is where Moe… Now, this is gonna be 15 minutes of…

0:50:37.1 MK: No, it won’t.

0:50:37.9 MH: Okay, so yes, Moe we can because I already predicted this would happen, I was prepared for it so go for it.

0:50:44.3 MK: Tim has put one on here, which I’m gonna hand over to him to talk about in a sec, but it’s actually a concept that I was talking about with one of the analysts on my team the other day, where we do this thing where it’s like you have to put on your profile what people should come to you for, and he put, “People should come to me for a second opinion.” And then he kind of talked about the logic of that. He was like, “Lots of people who work in data just say come to me for data.” And he’s like, “Really, you should be talking data with everyone in the business, it’s not just data practitioners that you should be talking data to.” So I don’t think that that’s a deep enough way of thinking about it, but I do think really deeply about the fact that we should all be getting second opinions. This is a way that you can collectively, we all know I’m obsessed with biases, check your biases, is by getting a second opinion. And Tim has one in here that’s maybe not as positive thinking, but still in the same vein, so I’ll hand over to you to say it in your own words.

0:51:43.6 TW: Wait a minute, is this the being quietly critical?

0:51:47.3 MK: It’s a second opinion.

0:51:49.2 TW: Yeah, it’s a… Well, I guess, I agree, I like your second opinion one ’cause also that actually presupposes that there’s a first opinion, and that’s saying, hopefully you’re trying to figure out what the…

0:52:00.8 MK: You at least formed an opinion.

0:52:02.2 TW: You formed an opinion, and now we’re trying to kick the tires ’cause an opinion’s maybe a hypothesis, but… So my mind was more that it hits me the most with presentations that we all sit and watch terrible presentations, and we watched so many… We’re inundated with shitty communication, and we’re kind of being trained how to be shitty communicators ’cause we do what we know. So that’s really, for me, it was actually critiquing the presentation of how something is delivered, not because I wanna go and tell people how to make it better. Great, there are opportunities for coaching, yes, yes, yes. But recognising when like, “Wow, this is boring.” Instead of just saying, “It’s a presentation, so of course, it’s boring,” saying, “How could this be better?” So that was really more of a learning from what you see others do when if it doesn’t, if it’s not, if your mind is wandering, if it’s unclear to stop and say, “How could that have been done better?” Because you wanna do better when you’re doing your own stuff, so maybe it was a completely different one. So that’s why I had said make it be critical or be critical of others. So it’s kind of a different thing, but I like how you ran with it.

0:53:19.7 MH: When I hired Tim Wilson at Search Discovery, that’s exactly what I wanted him to do, was be critical of other analysts. So looks like he’s taken that to heart and that’s amazing. Alright, we do need to wrap up, so we’ve gotten Moe’s secret last one in.

0:53:37.0 MK: I think we should have one extra special tip.

0:53:41.5 MH: Oh brother. Moe, you’re really stretch… You’re really pushing it.

0:53:47.9 TW: Tip for the moderator, leave time.

0:53:49.0 MK: Oh fuck!

0:53:49.6 MH: That’s right.

0:53:50.3 TW: Are we gonna have a special guest tip?

0:53:53.1 Michelle: Hi!

0:53:53.2 MH: Hi, Moe. What’s your next tip?

[laughter]

0:53:57.4 Michelle: Wrong and pissed.

0:53:58.2 TW: You sound a little bit different.

0:54:00.9 MH: That’s right. Hey, welcome to the podcast, Michelle!

0:54:03.6 Michelle: Hi guys! How are you doing?

0:54:06.6 MH: Hey. Good.

0:54:08.5 Michelle: I’m just crashing.

0:54:09.3 MH: That’s nice.

0:54:11.0 Michelle: And doing fun dance moves in the background. It’s a good thing for my sake that there isn’t video or anything like that.

0:54:15.6 MH: That’s right.

0:54:17.2 TW: There is hasty screen capture, so there you go.

0:54:20.5 MH: That’s right.

0:54:21.3 Michelle: I didn’t think of that, actually, that was a rocky move.

0:54:24.2 MH: Alright. So welcome special guest tipper. What’s your tip?

0:54:28.5 Michelle: Okay, so one of the things that I do, because I’m trying to keep track of lots of different sites and lots of different clients, and I know that a lot of the clients that I work with use Google Analytics, and the Google Analytics alerts suck, because they’re not very helpful, because they’re just like a little text thing, and I don’t know about you guys, but I completely ignore them. So what I’ve done is built a little report that is intended purely for myself. It has effectively just a bunch of little line charts or spark lines of three key metrics for every site that I work with. And it gets sent to me via email and I have to be really intentional to not read it because it pops up in my email every single day, and there have been so many things that I have caught that way just by having something that’s like a monitoring report for myself. No one else ever uses it, but I do.

0:55:22.6 MH: I like that.

0:55:23.3 TW: Did you do a blog post on this a while back?

0:55:25.1 Michelle: I did do a blog post on this.

0:55:27.6 MH: Oh, nice!

0:55:27.8 TW: Okay, look at that.

0:55:29.0 MH: We can then include it in the show notes then.

0:55:32.4 TW: Using Data Studio for Google Analytics alerts. This is gonna make it seem like I am very much up on blog posts and I’m not, but I actually remembered that one ’cause I was like, “That’s pretty slick.” And Michael’s gonna have his anecdote from when he was at Lands End, he built a report just for himself.

0:55:46.8 MH: Nope.

0:55:48.5 TW: No?

0:55:48.6 MH: Yeah, well, I did do that, but I wasn’t gonna mention it, but I have other ones that similar, but I’ve never thought what you just said, Michelle, which is combining multiples into one so you have one place to look for all. That’s actually pretty legit, especially if you’re in the consulting space or you work in a company that has lots and lots of different websites.

0:56:09.1 Michelle: Yeah, ’cause you’re not in everything every day, and so something can break and maybe it takes you a week to catch it or something, and that’s really not ideal, but this pops up in my email, it’s very visual. I find that when something drops off, like I’m pretty good at just using my own braininess pattern detection and saying like, “Oh well, duh, that was Thanksgiving, of course I expected a drop off,” versus, “Oh, that looks weird and bad, I should look into that.”

0:56:36.6 MH: Yeah, that’s awesome. Awesome, well, thank you.

0:56:41.2 TW: Well, thanks, Michelle. Good to see you. Look at that.

0:56:41.8 Michelle: Good to see you guys too. Would you like the real M Kiss back?

0:56:46.8 MH: Yes. Let’s get Moe back ’cause she has to do a last call. Unless you wanna keep telling and just do a last call for her.

0:56:53.8 Michelle: Tim’s like a bear. He’ll have you call me back.

0:56:55.8 MK: Hey.

0:56:57.2 MH: Either way.

0:57:00.3 MK: Jerk.

0:57:01.3 MH: Welcome back, Moe. We missed you. Alright, that’s some fun you can have around the holidays when people visit each other.

0:57:11.2 MK: When you can actually travel.

0:57:13.7 MH: Yeah, when you can. Yes, I’m sure we’re all locked down again, given this is a month later and Omicron is sweeping the globe. Okay, let’s do some last calls because we’ve definitely gotta get this show on the road.

[laughter]

0:57:28.9 MH: Moe, do you have a last call you’d like to share?

0:57:30.7 MK: I do. You can tell my family’s in town and how fucking awesome it is because my brother-in-law and sister also work in the same industry, so we can just talk shop, which is nice. I don’t use Data Studio a heap, but I still use it for a little bit of stuff. But Lee, I was trying to obviously drag tips and tricks out of my sister and my brother-in-law and Lee pointed me to a new blog post on Adswerve by Luke. Someone’s gonna have to help me with the name. Is it Sempre, Kempre? I don’t know, but he’s a senior data scientist, and there’s a new functionality in Data Studio, which is probably gonna have me using it even more, where you can actually filter the view of the Data Studio report by their email, so basically, you make one report and then based off the email address, it will show a slightly different view or different filters on, which I’m like, “That’s actually really fucking cool.” So thank you, Lee Isensee for that great tip.

0:58:28.7 MH: Alright. What about you, Tim? What’s your last call?

0:58:34.1 TW: So I am going to go with one of my many… One of the things that irritate me, the world of media. And there are different angles, there’s sort of bots, and is this paid digital media effective, but the duo of Nandini Jammi and Claire Atkin started Check My Ads. So they’ve got an interesting history where they’re really focused on when you’re an advertiser and buy into some… You have these lists, you’re like, “I don’t want my ad showing up next to objectionable content,” and they basically started digging in and finding all sorts of cases where major brands were showing up on sites that were objectionable and they were paying for the impressions to do that. So they have a company, but they also have checkmyads.org, the Check My Ads Institute, which you can actually donate to. And I would… They are… They do have a little bit of a… Maybe a lot of a political agenda, I’m guessing who you ask, it happens to align with me, but it’s one where they’re trying to bring some accountability to the digital media cesspool. There is actually like, they have Tim Wong, past guest on the podcast quoted on their site. So it’s all part of that this system has real problems and they’re trying to do something to fix it, and you can sign up and contribute and help them out, or if not, just kind of follow them on Twitter and on their site. What about you, Michael?

1:00:05.7 MH: Well, I’m glad you asked. So it’s not something that we are officially related to, but something all of us have been a part of in the past in some capacity, is the MeasureCamp unconference. I don’t know if it’s called an unconference, but it sort of is an unconference. Anyway, MeasureCamp North America is coming up very soon. And we have a way for you to get tickets with a special code.

[vocalization]

1:00:41.6 MH: If you go to northamerica.measurecamp.org, you use the code APH, you can get tickets. The next ticket drop is coming up, I believe, on the 31st of January, which is like just a week away. So basically, get this code, get ready with the next ticket drop, get your tickets to the MeasureCamp, that’s coming up, I believe, this February. And of course, right while I’m doing this, I can’t see the date.

1:01:05.8 TW: The 26th.

1:01:07.8 MH: It’s 26th of February, so you’ve got just over a month to get registered, but tickets go very fast, and that’s why you wanna use this code to get your tickets on the 31st. Okay, that’s my last call. Now, I’m sure you’ve been listening and thinking, “Hey, they seem to be doing these tips and tricks, and they’re really good at it, but there’s some stuff they’re missing,” and what should we be talking about in other tips and tricks or things like that. We’d love to hear from you. The best way to do that is on Twitter or on the Measure Slack group or our LinkedIn group. So yeah, we’d love to hear from you. The other thing I’d like to mention is apparently on Spotify, you can now rate podcasts and leave reviews, and so if you are a Spotify listener and you wanted to drop us a rating review, that does help with discoverability and things like that on various platforms.

1:01:55.5 MK: And make us feel good.

1:01:57.4 MH: And yeah, we like to read the reviews that are positive and does make us feel good, so that’s nice too. But also to help your fellow analysts find a good podcast from time to time. Alright, and of course, no show would be complete without this extra tip, which is if you’re gonna do an analytics podcast, you should probably have Josh Crowhurst as your producer, which is too bad for you ’cause we already do. He’s our producer. And we love him to death. Alright, in a good way, not to death, like, wait. Alright, yeah. Just when you say stuff like that, you’re like, “Well, that’s pretty morbid.” I guess, the pandemic changes a lot of stuff. Anyway, thank you, Josh, for all you do. Alright, I know you’re probably inundated with tips and tricks, and I think I speak for both of my co-hosts, Moe and Tim, when I say, no matter where you’re at in your analytics journey and what tips you’re using or tricks you’re trying to share with your team, just remember, the one thing you always wanna do is keep analyzing.

[music]

1:03:05.4 Announcer: Thanks for listening. Let’s keep the conversation going with your comments, suggestions and questions on Twitter at @analyticshour, on the web at analyticshour.io, our LinkedIn group and the Measure chat Slack group. Music for the podcast by Josh Crowhurst.

1:03:23.9 Charles Barkley: So smart guys want to fit in, so they made up a term called analytics. Analytics don’t work.

1:03:29.7 Thom Hammerschmidt: Analytics, oh my God, what the fuck does that even mean!

[music]

1:03:39.1 TW: I’m counting on some commentary on this spider. Moe just left the room.

1:03:43.7 MH: Uh-huh. Well, you know.

1:03:45.2 MK: Did you get him? There he is. He’s next to that black rubber band. Right there! Ah! Jesus Christ!

[laughter]

1:04:05.6 TW: Karen, Karen for the win.

1:04:07.2 MK: You fuckers! I know what you two are up to.

1:04:12.1 MH: Nothing.

1:04:12.5 TW: Recording. Karen saves the day. Mom gets the spider.

1:04:15.3 MK: I saw your faces of glee and I then noticed the recording button.

[laughter]

1:04:25.4 MH: Rock flag and snooze.

Podcast: Download | Embed

Subscribe: RSS