Hello, world. Thus begins the most exciting leap of my career.

Over the last year, a lot of people have asked me some form of the question, “What are you going to do next job-wise?”

Initially, my answer was, “I’m taking a minute to try to figure that out.” The truth was that I was balancing those minutes with a range of personal and professional adventures: 2023 was a year that had me on the road more than I’ve ever been in my life (118 nights to be precise; self-quantification didn’t stop, apparently). Fun. Exhausting. But having kids who reach adulthood and like to embark on far flung adventures with their parents? I recommend it!

At the same time, one foot remained firmly grounded in the analytics world, as I attended and spoke at Superweek Analytics Summit , MeasureCamp Czechia, and the DDMA Digital Analytics Summit ; continued to help organize Columbus Data & Analytics Wednesdays; continued as a co-host of the Analytics Power Hour podcast; grabbed meals or drinks with the likes of Ian Thomas , Doug Hall , DIPESH SHAH , Krista Seiden , Martijn Scheijbeler , and lots of local Columbus analytics types; and even signed an analytics book deal with Wiley (coming January 2025) and started writing that with Joe Sutherland .

And I thought.

A lot.

About what was next. I’ve had an exciting, fun, and challenging career up to this point, but I also hit a point with each of my past roles where I felt I had to move on. Something just wasn’t… right. While I was drawn to engaging with clients as to how they were using the vast volumes of data they had collected, various forces kept pushing those organizations to shift to “more”—gather more data, add more technology, add more people, hire more consultants to swap out data platforms (Teradata to Azure, PowerBI to Domo, Domo to Tableau, Adobe Analytics to Amplitude, Google Analytics to Adobe Analytics, Adobe Analytics to…Adobe Customer Journey Analytics). While, in absolute terms, none of these “more” tasks—more investments in the collection and management of data—were necessarily bad, they also consistently seemed to squeeze out the capacity to consistently and meaningfully put the data to use.

What I’m doing next is focusing on the use of data and where my co-founders— Valerie Kroll , David McBride , and Matty Wishnow —and I see organizations regularly stumbling with that: the upfront thought work. facts & feelings* is an intelligent business consultancy that enables our clients to do the elegantly simple—but brutally hard—work of transforming people with data & software into teams with focus & insight. We believe that less is better when it comes to data:

• We have enough data
• The data is clean enough
• The data, analytics, research, and optimization teams (internal or external) are smart and capable

What’s missing? It’s elegantly simple:

?? Lack of unambiguous alignment on goals with clearly defined, outcome-oriented measures and targets

?? A failure to identify, size, and prioritize what problems will prevent the organization from achieving those goals

?? A hypothesis-based orientation to the potential solutions to the problems most worth solving

For a couple of decades now, the explosion of data that has come with the simultaneous emergence of “digital” and the dominance of “the cloud,” organizations have been waiting…and waiting…and waiting for clarity on what to do with all of this data. And, while the data absolutely is answering questions and providing insights, every organization I’ve worked with has felt that the flow of those is a relative trickle inside a deluge of reports and dashboards and spreadsheets and experiments.

We think we have a better way. And it starts with the people—recognizing that the most underutilized data in many organizations are the ideas in the heads of the employees of the company. That may sound conceptual, but the services we’ve developed are very tactical and pragmatic. I’d love to tell you more! Reach out and connect here or shoot me an email at [email protected]!

Or, if you’re going to be at Adobe Summit in Las Vegas March 26-28 or at MeasureCamp New York on April 13th and would like to meet up, let me know!

* That’s right. Feelings. We have a strongly held belief that the intuition, experience, and creativity of human beings is too readily downplayed in this space. I may be an anti-hug analytics curmudgeon, but I have always felt (a feeling!) that the make or break on how impactful any analytics or optimization project will be is the extent to which hard “thought work” is done at the outset.