The Analytics Power Hour

#306: Decision Support Has Been the Point All Along

Before there was BI, there were "decision support systems." Somewhere along the way, we seem to have quietly dropped the "decision support" part and just kept the systems

#305: Personal Interest + Analytics Chops = Career?

Stephen Follows has spent 15 years turning film-industry curiosity into a career — asking questions like how much movies really earn, why poster colors have shifted over

#304: I Can Haz AI?

Everyone's posting their AI projects online like proud pet owners sharing videos of their cat doing something marginally impressive — cute, occasionally clever, sometimes

#303: Funnels Assume Progress. Barriers Recognize Reality.

Twenty years of digital marketing created something of a monster: companies poured enormous investment into analytics teams, MarTech stacks, media capabilities, and data

#302: It Was a Dark and Stormy Insight...

Here's a question analysts almost never ask themselves before walking into a room: why am I actually here? Not "because it's the weekly meeting" or "because someone asked

#301: It Turns Out Analysts Are Natural AI Crafters

There's a certain type of person who first encounters Excel and, instead of running in terror, leans in and grins. Rob Collie has spent his career-from the Excel team at

#300: Are Semantic Layers Really Necessary?

If you've ever poured months into building a semantic layer only to watch it become shelfware the moment the business pivoted, Jacob Matson has some thoughts. And a metap

#299: AI Can (Help) Build the Dashboard. It Can't Build the Buy-In.

There are roughly a thousand ways to roll out a new analytics platform, a BI tool migration, or an AI initiative to your organization. Most of them involve a town hall, a

#298: Listener Questions Answered Live from Marketing Analytics Summit!

Picture this: four analytics professionals, one live audience, a bunch of submitted questions, and absolutely no filter when it comes to sharing their real thoughts about

#297: Durable Wisdom in an Age of AI Slop

What do colors, soup kitchens, and mountain climbing have in common? They're all part of the mental models that have shaped how we think about analytics, and they're exac

#296: Avoiding Major Oopsies: Twyman's Law, Intuition, and Valuing Accuracy Over Precision

What do diamond ring shopping, Uber pricing psychology, and active user metrics gone wrong have in common? They all highlight our complicated relationship with precision

#295: Research and Analytics: the Peanut Butter and Chocolate of Data?

Research and analytics: are they more like peanut butter and chocolate, or more like oil and water? On this episode, we dig into the surprisingly common (and surprisingly

#294: Adapting an Analytics Team to an AI World

AI is moving fast. But so is life. AI is widely recognized as a must-adopt technology, but how and where are data workers expected to find the time for that?! Organizatio

#293: Tool Selection and the Unhelpfulness of Feature Comparisons

The one rule about the Analytics Power Hour is that we don't talk about specific tools. But that doesn't mean we won't talk about tool SELECTION! Jason Packer recently re

#292: AI Without Adult Supervision with Aubrey Blanche

As Kevin McCallister once taught us: just because the house is still standing doesn't mean everything's under control. Everyone's racing to adopt AI, but has anyone actua

#291: The Data Work that Lives in the Shadows

We know what the work of the data practitioner is, right? It's everything from managing data ingestion to data governance to report development to experimental design to

#290: Always Be Learning

From a professional development perspective, you should always be learning: listening to podcasts, reading books, connecting with internal colleagues, following useful pe

#289: The Imperative of Developing Business Acumen

That darn data. It's so complicated and fragmented and gap-filled and noisy that no amount of time is ever enough to truly get to the bottom of all of its complexity. As

#288: Our LLM Suggested We Chat about MCP. Kinda' Meta, No?

If there's one thing that we absolutely knew would be coming along with the increased interest and use of AI, it would be… more acronyms! And, along with the acronyms, we

#287: 2025 Year in Review

It's the most…won…derful…tiiiiime…of the year! And by that, we mean it's the time of the year when we sit back, look at each other, and ask, "Where did all the time go?!"