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David Andersen's avatar

Let me tell you about the time we built a data warehouse and dashboards to discover our red-yellow-green dot system could be reduced to just red and green.

Seriously though, the best analytics project I ever worked on was designing a data model to understand and improve the efficiency of a state court system.

Questions like 'with case types of X, are certain judges consistently more efficient than others?' and 'how fast on average does each judicial district clear cases?'

Lots more I can't remember, but it was fascinating stuff and no one had done anything like it at the time. The guy in the state court system spearheading it was a pioneer. Designing that data model was a blast.

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random's avatar

Another hard hit piece, thank you Ben,

I definitely share this sentiment. I am a data product manager. Every time when our execs have a hard time trying to figure out use cases for something we are building, my manager would say' we are builing a car but you guys only know how to ride horses, so you probably won't understand what we are building until you see it.' In my mind I would ask myself 'are we trying building a car here? Or are we just churning out yet another horse that will eventually be forgotten about just like all the previous cars that we promised to build.

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