12 Iterating on someone else’s work: Data preparation
This chapter covers
- Continuing the work of another analyst
- Investigating and verifying an existing analysis
- Preparing event-level data to be suitable for user-level segmentation
Every analyst will need to continue someone else’s work at some point. This “someone” might be a past version of you from months ago. The process for working on the second version of a project is the same as starting from scratch.
Because we will own this new version, we still need to understand the problem, look at the available data, and so on, even if someone else has already done it. In this project, you will get the opportunity to practice taking over from someone else. Another analyst has prepared the minimum viable answer to a stakeholder question, on which you will iterate.
The specific topic of this chapter is one that is also common in the real world: segmentation. Most businesses have questions in the form of “How are some things similar to other things?” where the thing in question could be anything from a product to a customer to an entire geographic area.