The question that started a career.
The original spark for Analytics at DoorDash came from a simple question: “How do we know if a market launch is going well?”
At first, I thought this was a measurement problem.
We needed better metrics, better dashboards, and a consistent way to compare performance across markets.
Those things mattered. But they weren’t the hardest part.
The real challenge wasn’t measurement. It was decision-making.
We needed a shared definition of good performance. We needed to understand which outcomes mattered, which inputs teams could control, but most importantly, we needed to identify what leaders should do when performance moved off plan.
The question wasn’t simply “What should we measure?”
It became: “What decision are we trying to make, and how can data help us make it better?”
That question eventually became BizOps. Later, it evolved into Analytics.
What is Analytics?
People often ask me what an Analytics team does. My answer has stayed remarkably consistent: Analytics exists to help the business make better decisions and improve measurable outcomes.
Most Analytics leaders would probably agree with that statement. The challenge isn’t defining the purpose of Analytics. It’s building a team—and an organization—that consistently operates that way.
A useful Analytics team answers questions, builds dashboards, analyzes experiments, and makes information easier to access.
A great Analytics team goes further. They help define the problem, bring a point of view on the decision, and stay involved long enough to learn whether the decision worked.
That’s what I mean by owning the outcome.
It doesn’t mean Analytics owns the business result on their own. It means Analytics shares responsibility for the quality of the decision by ensuring the team:
Asked the right question.
Used the right evidence.
Understood the relevant trade-offs.
Made a clear decision.
Learned from what happened next.
Four questions behind every Analytics request
I’ve found that nearly every Analytics request becomes better after answering four questions.
Acknowledgements: The ideas and writing are mine, but they’ve been shaped by current and former teammates who challenged my thinking and helped evolve how we built and ran the Analytics team. Special thanks to my Chief of Staff, Anita Chan, for brainstorming, editing, and AI wizardry on the images, and to ChatGPT and Claude for serving as editorial critics.
This is really awesome. Simple and clear but extremely impactful
Every single line in this article resonates deeply. I especially like the part where you have highlighted that landing better business outcomes is a shared responsibility among 3 distinct groups: Analytics teams, Analytics leaders, xFN leaders. This is a deep behavior change that needs to happen across many orgs