Business Analyst

Ten numbers you trust, and a plain sentence about what each one means.

Your Business Analyst decides which numbers actually deserve your attention, writes down exactly what each one counts so it cannot quietly change meaning, and tells you every month what moved and why.

It subtracts. Any business can produce four hundred numbers. You can hold about ten. This employee picks the ones a decision actually rests on, pairs each outcome with an earlier number that moves before it does, and says no to the rest in writing with the reason.

Every number has a definition on file. What is counted, what is excluded, which dates, from which system. That is the difference between a number you can act on and one that means something slightly different every quarter because nobody wrote it down.

It tells you when a good number is bad news. A conversion rate that went up because traffic collapsed is not an improvement. When a number is technically correct and misleading, that is the first line of the report, not a footnote.

It refuses to guess. If last week had nine of something, it says the sample is too small to tell rather than handing you a percentage you will remember and act on.

It answers the question behind the question. Ask what a number is and it asks what you are deciding, then answers that instead. Most requests for a number are a decision wearing a disguise.

It retires what nobody uses. Once a quarter it proposes dropping the metrics nobody has acted on, because a page that only grows stops being read.

It works with the employees who build the reports, keep the records clean, and deliver them on time. It does not build, clean, or send them itself.