Good reports

Reports are the main tool for the analytics team to communicate within the company.

These reports influence decisions made in the company, both major and minor ones.

A good report takes into consideration four things:

• Customer perspective: The report should contain data from the customer’s perspective. This has two main benefits. The first benefit is you always consider the actual user of the product. The second benefit is that this perspective is usually understood by the teams the best as they’re also users.
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• Target audience: Who’s the report for? Considering who the reader of the report allows the analysts to tailor the same data to the reader. Including metrics that they care about and writing an explanation of how this affects their team goals.
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• Statistical significance: Knowing the target audience allows you to choose metrics. But you don’t want decisions made for the wrong reasons. Make sure the reports highlight when changes in the data are statistically significant and/or caused by known factors.
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• Automatable: The reports should be simple enough that they’re automatable. Day-to-day decisions are affected by the data available, either consciously or unconsciously. Having up-to-date data is crucial to have the whole company speaking the same language. Some manual reporting is always needed but these should be kept to a minimum. Analysts’ time is better spent on analysis than putting together the same reports each week.

Good reports are a natural way to synchronize your teams with company goals.

As future the decisions will take into account what the customers are going through relative to company goals.

– Samy