Learning the tips and tricks for doing data analysis in Excel is great and all, but stepping back to see the bigger picture leads to better questions (and answers) you can ask as an analyst. Benn Stancil is one of the founders at Mode Analytics, a data visualization platform you may have used before. Benn has done a ton of typical "analyst" work (check out his newsletter and previous Medium blog) but in this episode we talk about building Mode in the early days, asking good questions, and of course a little bit about Excel and the tools he uses.

Life before and founding story of Mode Analytics

Benn was a math and economics major in college. He worked in DC for a few years for a think tank doing economic policy research. It was an interesting time to do this type of analysis because this was right around the start of the financial crisis in 2008. Frustrated with his research not being able to make an impact given the glacial pace government adopts change, Benn ended up finding a job at Yammer (a social network for professionals, sound familiar?). Yammer was acquired in 2012 by Microsoft and Benn and some folks from the analytics team at Yammer left Microsoft to start Mode.

I would take a look at this blog post from Benn to get his reflections on the early days at Mode, but here is a quick summary. The founding team at Mode includes Derek Steer (CEO), Josh Ferguson (CTO), and Benn (the analytics guy). Before there was really a product, Derek was off talking to investors and Josh is talking to the engineers. Benn's expertise is in doing data-related stuff, but the problem is there wasn't a lot of data to analyze or explore and not many customers to get data from.

In the early days, Benn wrote blog posts that were generally about data but not about data products. He was basically doing content marketing for a small nice of data professionals. Today this is called data journalism and Benn was writing data stories related to sports (before 538 became ta thing). Once Mode had more customers, Benn's role changed often as he did tours of duties through marketing, customer support, sales, and a variety of other roles.

You have a "job title" and a "role" and those end up being two are very different things.

We talked a bit about a blog post Benn wrote in 2015 that had some traction in the data community on Facebook's "magic metric" of getting 7 friends in 10 days. The key takeaway is that Benn was doing the analysis in Excel, R, and a little python for web scraping. Benn had taught himself how to use some of these tools before. Now that he had a goal to work towards (creating these blog posts), this was the extra push for him to get over the hump to learn these tools more in-depth.

Source: Mode blog

Key skills for doing exploratory data analysis

I liked Benn's answer to this open-ended question because it doesn't involve mastering X tool or taking advanced statistics classes:

First and foremost you have to be curious. Be relentless in knowing there's a better answer out there.

Most analysts get a dataset and just look at the data to start generating questions as they do the analysis.