Golden Data · a workbench by Paul Brown
Bridge data with strategy.
I’m Paul Brown — fourteen years turning messy data into decisions people actually trust: governed data models and semantic layers in fintech, and the propensity work that recovered eight figures of pipeline on enterprise sales channels. Now I build AI-first and in the open from Ogden, UT. Golden Data is my workbench — tools you can use today, dashboards rebuilt from public data, shipped products that earn real money, and two weekly letters, every area entering through the same bench.
- What this is
- A working bench, published as I build it in the open — the place where I prove the patterns I write about actually hold up in production, not just on a slide. Every tool runs on real, inspectable data, and the code sits on GitHub for anyone to read.
- What this isn’t
- Not a portfolio prop, a lead-capture funnel, or a pitch dressed up as a demo. No login, no tracking, no email wall — use anything on the bench, and take what’s useful without ever giving something up in return.
Nothing on the bench matches that yet.
Try a tool, a dataset, or a topic — ‘eval’, ‘salary’, ‘nuclear’, ‘gif’.
Golden Data / Tools
Small tools for the work I actually do
Pipeline coverage and capacity math from the revenue-ops day job, cost caps and eval sizing for AI features, house rules for prose — plus a few built for my own life. No login, no tracking, no email wall.
Pick a tool
Background Remover
Drop in a photo or a screenshot, cut the backdrop out, and download a transparent PNG. It only takes background that touches an edge, so a white shirt in the middle of the frame survives. Nothing is uploaded.
Super PAC Structure Picker
Six questions — money to candidates, money above the limits, donors public or not, who is behind it — and out comes the committee type you actually need, the FEC Form 1 box to check, the filing calendar, and your "paid for by" line.
Pipeline Coverage Planner
Quota, closed-won, open pipeline, and win rate in — coverage ratio, projected finish, and the pipeline you still have to build (in deals, per week) out. The quarter math, without the spreadsheet.
Sales Capacity Planner
Will the team you have hit the number you signed up for? Reps, ramp, attainment, and attrition in — effective selling capacity, the gap to plan, and what it takes to close it.
Comp Plan Payout Curve
A comp plan is a curve, not a paragraph. OTE, pay mix, threshold, accelerator, and cap in — the whole plan drawn live, with total cash at attainment and what the next point is worth.
SaaS Metrics Scorecard
The five numbers a revenue leader gets asked for first — NRR, GRR, magic number, CAC payback, Rule of 40 — computed from raw inputs and scored against public benchmarks.
Ogden Home Finder
A living catalogue of Ogden-metro housing — tracked daily with price history, days-on-market, and an interactive map. Rent today, for-sale next. Updated by a Claude scheduled task.
Browser GIF & Meme Maker
Panel layouts and caption templates for your own pictures, with Impact text you can drag anywhere — or turn a screen recording into a platform-sized GIF with trim, boomerang playback, filters, and client-side ffmpeg. Nothing is uploaded.
AI Feature Cost Estimator
Size the monthly bill for an LLM feature before you build it. Requests, tokens, and rates in — cost per request, monthly, and annual out.
Eval Set Sizer
How many golden examples do you actually need? Pick a target accuracy, a margin of error, and a confidence level — get the sample size.
Prose Voice Linter
Paste a draft. It flags the banned words, exclamation points, and passive voice, then checks the short-declarative rhythm — the exact house rules behind Signal and Crafting.
A/B Test Calculator
Drop in visitors and conversions for two variants to see lift, a p-value, and whether the result is real. Plus a planner for how many you need before you start.
Next on the bench
Every area hands you to the freshest thing next door — never a dead end. The full build log keeps the running pulse, newest first.
Golden Data / Dashboards
Field notes and briefs, in the open
Questions chased for their own sake, and the same engine aimed at a company. Years of Tableau work — happiness, economics, mobility — ported into interactive charts that live natively on the site. Reskinned to the house style, not embedded in an iframe.
Pick a field note
Salomon — Senior Manager, Sales Operations, Data & Forecasting
A JD case study for Salomon’s North America sales-operations seat in Ogden — the analytical backbone of a seasonal wholesale book: one consolidated forecast, a Power BI layer with governed definitions and row-level security, a plan-to-sell-through funnel that decomposes every miss, and the team that runs it. Illustrative data only.
Golden Data Analytics — the People Analytics wedge
A use case built by reading UKG Pro People Analytics against itself — its own product sheet routes “ideal” dashboards through paid professional services, prices nothing, and benchmarks from an unnamed data collection. The counter-offer: a governed, narrative, sourced HR analytics layer assembled from four things already running on this site, priced in the open.
Gong — People Analytics Manager
A JD case study for Gong’s people-analytics seat — the wedge battlecard from the Golden Data Analytics teardown, aimed at a posting that names the whole seam: Workday, CultureAmp, and Greenhouse as sources, dbt and Snowflake as the stack, governance and responsible AI adoption as the mandate. Illustrative data only.
Synchrony — AVP, Analytics, Health & Wellness Sales
A JD case study for Synchrony’s Health & Wellness sales-analytics seat — one truth layer for four B2B sales teams covering 280,000+ providers: governed metric definitions, a provider coverage-to-production funnel, test-and-control initiative measurement, and executive dashboards a divisional CEO reads. Illustrative data only.
The Leak Gate
The agent-vs-human scorecard reads my real task manager — titles, notes, and people attached — and publishes none of it. The anatomy of the dbt layer in between: allow-list models that emit only aggregates, a leak gate with an oracle built from the private contacts table, and the week a mutable timestamp restamped 90 days of history into two buckets without failing a single test. The incident is now a test.
Reddit — Senior Vendor Performance Manager, North America
A working operating system for Reddit’s vendor-run North American SMB Ads book: continuity control for the backfill, a 100+ seller capacity model, the agency lead-to-repeat-spend funnel, additive revenue variance, and a QBR action loop. Illustrative data only; the operating logic is the proof.
Acima — Data Scientist, Fraud Prevention & Risk Analytics
A JD case study for Acima’s own fraud data-science role — the fraud decision waterfall (identity, velocity/device, the ML score), the hybrid rules+ML operating point, and the fraud-loss-vs-friction frontier. The one role in the set written from the inside: Acima’s lease-to-own funnel is the book I worked.
The Week That Had No Weekend
In 1929 the Soviet Union tried to abolish the weekend. The nepreryvka split the workforce into five colour groups on a rotating five-day cycle — four-fifths always working, so the factories never stopped, and no universal Sunday to anchor religious life. The staggering fractured families: pick two people’s colours and watch their days off never line up. Traces the calendar from the five-day week to the six-day shestidnevka to the seven-day week’s return in 1940 — and debunks the two myths the story usually carries.
When Sweden Vacations Together
Terry Hartig tracked how many antidepressants Swedish pharmacists dispensed, month by month, for twelve years. The more workers were on vacation at the same time, the fewer prescriptions went out that month — and the effect reached retirees too, who had no job to break from. Evidence that rest is contagious. Rebuilt from the paper’s published ARIMA coefficients: an exact dose-response curve, the drop group-by-group, and a reconstruction of the raw seasonal series.
The Agent-vs-Human Scorecard
The workbench measured on itself over a rolling 90-day window. Every task is tagged with who did it — agent or human — and this is the two-column readout of that split: outcome rate, dollars per instance, and minutes to complete. Fed live at build time from anonymized database views (see the dbt leak gate) that never expose a task title, note, or category.
Productivity Has Left Wages in the Dust
For a generation the typical worker’s pay rose right alongside what they produced. Around 1973 the lines split — net productivity is up +298% since 1948, worker pay only +143% — and the wedge between them is income workers generated but didn’t take home. The setup for the obvious next question: will the AI productivity surge flow back to pay, or repeat the pattern? Fed by EPI’s State of Working America data.
How Far CEO Pay Pulled Away
In 1965 a big-company CEO made about 21 times a typical worker; the ratio peaked at 408:1 in 2021 and sits at 280:1 today. Because executive pay is mostly stock, the line swings with the market — toggle the S&P 500 overlay to see it track. The options-realized measure for the 350 largest U.S. firms, fed by EPI’s State of Working America data — then search a company you know for its own ratio, straight from its SEC proxy.
PE portfolio — Applied AI Engineer (Forward-Deployed)
The stretch goal: a forward-deployed AI engineer embedded across a PE portfolio. Honest that full-stack at staff depth is the reach — but the AI-native half (Claude Code, MCP servers, custom skills, context engineering, tool benchmarking, enablement) is my daily practice, and this whole site is the proof. The spine is reuse: build once, redeploy across the portfolio.
Nuclear Weapon Inventory
Every nuclear warhead on Earth, year by year since 1945. The stockpile peaked at 64,452 in 1986 and has fallen 85% since — almost all of it the US and Russia dismantling Cold-War arsenals. Flip between total stockpile and the year-over-year buildup/teardown, overlay the arms-control treaties, and isolate any of the nine arsenals on a linked world map. Fed by an FAS/Our World in Data feed that refreshes year to year.
Wealth-tech CRM — Sr RevOps Engineer (GTM Systems)
The off-thesis one: a RevOps / GTM-systems role, not an analytics seat. Reframed around the part that’s hard to hire for — a trustworthy lead-to-revenue funnel with data quality and AI-native workflows on top — and honest about where Salesforce/CPQ admin depth is the ramp. The same full-funnel engine, pointed at a GTM stack.
Topology of Music
Every song I’ve logged since 2019, rebuilt from Tableau as a “mountain range” of my top-15 artists. Not just who I played most, but who I stayed loyal to — each artist climbs for every return inside four days and dips when I let them lapse. deadmau5 never stops climbing.
Mormon Pioneer Trek to the Salt Lake Valley
The 56,000 Latter-day Saints who walked 1,300 miles to the Salt Lake Valley, rebuilt from Tableau as one themed dashboard. A young people’s migration (58% under 25), cholera as the trail’s defining killer, a U-shaped mortality curve — and the Company Type filter made real: pick Willie & Martin to watch mortality jump to 16.5%.
Faith and Human Evolution: Mental Gymnastics
Forty-eight religious university students, read back two of their own contradictory survey answers — “Adam & Eve are our universal ancestors” and “humans share an ancestor with apes.” Half saw no conflict at all. Built from a public BYU interview-transcript deposit: the seven moves they use to hold both at once, and a wall of the transcripts verbatim (“we got our latest model, let’s, Adam and Eve let’s go”).
Start here — one engine, many roles
The through-line behind the whole portfolio: one analytical engine — full-funnel, LTV, experimentation, exec scorecards, Voice-of-Customer — reskinned across competitor spotlights, JD case studies, and AI-enabled work.
Synchrony — VP, Co-Brand & Lifecycle Analytics
A JD case study: the mandate reframed, a 90-day plan, a co-brand cardholder lifecycle funnel, and a requirement→proof map — the same lifecycle-analytics engine I built for Acima, pointed at a co-brand card book.
Affirm — Director, Analytics (Strategic Insights)
A JD case study for Affirm’s Strategic Insights role — the BNPL consumer lifecycle and the Card-attach growth lever, with proof that pairs to my full Affirm competitor spotlight.
Concora Credit — VP, Risk (Fraud Strategy & Analytics)
A JD case study for a subprime credit-card risk leader — the decisioning funnel (first-payment default, charge-offs, the approval/loss frontier), mapped to the Acima risk model I built. The closest fit in the set to that role’s actual day.
Chime — Director, Product Analytics
A JD case study for Chime’s Product Analytics role — the neobank member lifecycle, the direct-deposit activation unlock, and an experimentation-first 90-day plan, with proof mapped to the Dave spotlight.
Airbnb — Staff, Payments Advanced Analytics
A JD case study for Airbnb’s Payments analytics role — the payment funnel, an authorization-rate causal experiment, and the same experimentation + exec-scorecard engine, pointed at money movement.
Headspace — Director, AI Enablement
A different kind of case study: this portfolio IS the proof. A dozen-plus sourced, cited analyses shipped via an AI research→build operating model I designed — discovery→pilot→scale, with responsible-AI guardrails on every page.
Target — Director, Quantitative UX Research & AI Enablement
A JD case study for Target’s Quantitative UX Research role — behavior-vs-voice measurement and a VoC research signal, mapped to my CX Research & Market Intelligence brief and AI-scaled research workflows.
Best Buy — Director, Customer Insights & Integration
A JD case study for Best Buy’s Customer Insights role — the retail customer lifecycle and the channel-integration payoff, mapped to the lifecycle-analytics engine.
Citizens — Head of Decisioning Analytics & Optimization
A JD case study for Citizens’ decisioning role — the portfolio decision funnel optimized end-to-end against profitability, mapped to the decision-optimization engine.
Competitor Spotlight: Progressive Leasing
A deep-dive on Progressive Leasing / PROG Holdings (NYSE: PRG) — Acima’s purest pure-play mirror, the virtual-LTO rival Acima overtook on GMV in FY2025. Includes the $175M FTC settlement. Public data, every figure cited.
Competitor Spotlight: Dave
A deep-dive on Dave (NASDAQ: DAVE) — Brigit’s most direct competitor, already 2–3× its size, GAAP-profitable, with a banking flywheel Brigit lacks. Public data, every figure cited.
Upbound — Customer Performance Analytics
Inside Acima’s funnel: an interactive unit-economics & LTV model calibrated to the filed FY2025 results, a leakage diagnostic, an experimentation readout, and the SQL underneath. Public data only.
Upbound — Competitive & Market Intelligence
An original market-intelligence briefing on Upbound Group (Acima, Rent-A-Center, Brigit) and the accessible-finance arena — lease-to-own vs BNPL vs cash advance. Every figure sourced and dated.
Competitor Spotlight: Affirm
A deep-dive on Affirm (NASDAQ: AFRM) — the no-late-fee, simple-interest, prime-leaning BNPL that sets the transparency benchmark high-take-rate lease-to-own is judged against. Public data, every figure cited.
Competitor Spotlight: Sezzle
A deep-dive on Sezzle (NASDAQ: SEZL) — the subprime-leaning, super-app-building BNPL on a collision course with Acima and Brigit. Trajectory, business model, head-to-head, and implications. Public data, every figure cited.
The Happiness Reports
Three reads on happiness and suicide. The paradox: why happy countries like Finland carry high suicide rates (after Gladwell), on a scatter + world map with a World Cup 2026 lens. Over time: a decade stacked against GDP, where the gap widened and a third of countries grew richer yet sadder. And the decline: world suicide rates fell nearly a fifth since 2000 — happiness never noticed.
Next on the bench
Every area hands you to the freshest thing next door — never a dead end. The full build log keeps the running pulse, newest first.
Golden Data / Work
The work itself, with the decision it serves
Shipped features and dashboards — each tied to the moment someone has to choose, and what changed once it landed. The proof, not the pitch.
The builds
Salary Dashboard
Data-role salary panels from ai-jobs.net postings: base salary only, USD, global, with role classification, per-role outlier trim, sample-size gates, and explicit methodology notes.
Browser GIF & Meme Maker
A browser-native meme and GIF maker: place any number of Impact captions on a photo, add a caption bar above it, or convert a short screen recording with trim, boomerang playback, filters, and target-size compression — without sending source files to a server.
High School Pathways
Ogden School District’s degree-requirement PDF rebuilt as a living visual roadmap. Parents see credits earned, gaps to close, and the next decision they need to make.
Economic Dashboard
Live macro indicators from FRED — Buffett indicator, yield curve, employment, housing — with a running notebook of what each move means. Refreshed weekdays by a GitHub Action.
Ogden Home Finder
A living catalogue of Ogden-metro housing. A daily Claude task scrapes 2BR rentals, tracks price history and days-on-market, and renders everything on an interactive map and filterable table — with for-sale homes landing next.
Next on the bench
Every area hands you to the freshest thing next door — never a dead end. The full build log keeps the running pulse, newest first.
Golden Data / Writing
Two columns and a build log
Signal for the people deciding what to build; Crafting for the people doing the work. Plus a running log of everything shipped here, newest first.
Read along
Signal
What B2B SaaS shipped, and what it admits — sales ops, ad tech, analytics, BI. What’s working, what’s bolted on, and one feature I’d build this week.
Crafting
Where the senior analytics craft is moving — the skills climbing the premium curve, the tooling rewriting job descriptions, one move worth making before Monday.
The Build Log
A running log of everything shipped here — a dashboard, a tool, a newsletter issue — newest first. The workbench pulse, in one feed.
Next on the bench
Every area hands you to the freshest thing next door — never a dead end. The full build log keeps the running pulse, newest first.
Golden Data / Autopilot
This site keeps itself current
Scrapers, validators, and agents refresh the data behind these pages on their own schedules — pull, validate, commit, redeploy — with no one at the keyboard. 4/4 pipelines current, 2,115 records kept live, every figure read at build time from the actual data files.
The pipelines, live
Economic indicators
Pulls fresh series from FRED, validates every one against release-window and drift thresholds, gates on a clean build, commits the snapshot, and lets Vercel redeploy. A failed check opens a GitHub issue and emails an alert instead of shipping bad data.
Ogden housing scrape
A scheduled Claude skill scrapes the rent and buy catalogues, diffs them against the tracked history (first-seen, price changes, dropped listings), merges, and commits the JSON straight to main.
JD salary tracker
Pulls recent analytics-leadership openings by role family, rewrites the openings feed and the newsletter digest, and pushes to main.
Safe-publish layer (dbt)
Anonymized dbt views over the private task database — allow-list models that emit only aggregates, then a leak gate (allow-list, PII patterns, a contacts oracle) plus range and derivation tests. A red test blocks publish; the site never reads a view the gates have not passed.
Next on the bench
Every area hands you to the freshest thing next door — never a dead end. The full build log keeps the running pulse, newest first.
Everything, newest first
Every published thing on the bench in one reverse-chron feed — tools, dashboards, and newsletter issues, mingled. Filter to a kind; deselect to bring the rest back.
- They deprecated the part that worked.AWS closed Bedrock Agents to new customers on July 30 and renamed it Classic, OpenAI removes the Assistants API on August 26 after a twelve-month notice, and a July 19 decomposition of a production agent found most of its accuracy came from scaffolding — the exact layer three vendors are asking you to rebuild.
- They revised away 103,000 jobs. The seniority data held.Payrolls fell 23,000 in July and the prior two months were revised away by 103,000, two days after a panel of economists called the unemployment rate in the wrong direction — but the seniority cut of the same data is unambiguous, and it points at the roles I am aiming at.
- BriefSalomon — Senior Manager, Sales Operations, Data & ForecastingA JD case study for Salomon’s North America sales-operations seat in Ogden — the analytical backbone of a seasonal wholesale book: one consolidated forecast, a Power BI layer with governed definitions and row-level security, a plan-to-sell-through funnel that decomposes every miss, and the team that runs it. Illustrative data only.
- BriefGolden Data Analytics — the People Analytics wedgeA use case built by reading UKG Pro People Analytics against itself — its own product sheet routes “ideal” dashboards through paid professional services, prices nothing, and benchmarks from an unnamed data collection. The counter-offer: a governed, narrative, sourced HR analytics layer assembled from four things already running on this site, priced in the open.
- BriefGong — People Analytics ManagerA JD case study for Gong’s people-analytics seat — the wedge battlecard from the Golden Data Analytics teardown, aimed at a posting that names the whole seam: Workday, CultureAmp, and Greenhouse as sources, dbt and Snowflake as the stack, governance and responsible AI adoption as the mandate. Illustrative data only.
- Snap Lost Users and Rose 10%. Pinterest Set a Record and Fell.Snap's North American users fell 7% and the stock rose 14%. Its North American ARPU rose 23% to $10.26. Pinterest set a user record and fell 9% on the cost of the AI buildout. Last issue's engagement thesis was wrong, and the reason it was wrong is that I was reading the year-over-year line while the market was reading the sequential one.
- Reddit's Ad Revenue Grew 64%. The Stock Fell 21% on 300,000 Users.Reddit's ad revenue grew 64% and the stock fell 21% on a 300,000-user dip. Meta's ad machine grew 27% and fell 8% on capex. Two prints, one lesson about which number a revenue operations leader is actually hired to explain.
- BriefSynchrony — AVP, Analytics, Health & Wellness SalesA JD case study for Synchrony’s Health & Wellness sales-analytics seat — one truth layer for four B2B sales teams covering 280,000+ providers: governed metric definitions, a provider coverage-to-production funnel, test-and-control initiative measurement, and executive dashboards a divisional CEO reads. Illustrative data only.
- The vendor wrote the definition of successSalesforce made Agentforce Help Agent generally available this month at $2 per autonomous resolution, HubSpot metered custom agents by the run on July 23 while its packaged agents bill by outcome, and a June 30 validity audit found tool-calling evaluators disagree with human judgment 18.5% of the time. You now buy an outcome your vendor defines, scores, and invoices.
- The Layoff Tracker Is Written for Investors. Most ICs Read It as a Verdict.
- The wrong answer costs the most.Databricks metered Genie Agents on July 8, made it free on July 15, and reversed the charges on July 21 — and every cost control it shipped in six weeks points at the same thing, which is not the question but the retry.
- ToolBackground RemoverDrop in a photo or a screenshot, cut the backdrop out, and download a transparent PNG. It only takes background that touches an edge, so a white shirt in the middle of the frame survives. Nothing is uploaded.
- ToolSuper PAC Structure PickerSix questions — money to candidates, money above the limits, donors public or not, who is behind it — and out comes the committee type you actually need, the FEC Form 1 box to check, the filing calendar, and your "paid for by" line.
- The Leak GateThe agent-vs-human scorecard reads my real task manager — titles, notes, and people attached — and publishes none of it. The anatomy of the dbt layer in between: allow-list models that emit only aggregates, a leak gate with an oracle built from the private contacts table, and the week a mutable timestamp restamped 90 days of history into two buckets without failing a single test. The incident is now a test.
- The Metric Definition Is Becoming a File. Most Portfolios Are Still a Dashboard.Two standards bodies moved this month toward the same thing: a metric definition that lives as a version-controlled file instead of a formula inside a dashboard. The senior analytics interview is already screening for it. Here is the sixty-minute version.
- BriefReddit — Senior Vendor Performance Manager, North AmericaA working operating system for Reddit’s vendor-run North American SMB Ads book: continuity control for the backfill, a 100+ seller capacity model, the agency lead-to-repeat-spend funnel, additive revenue variance, and a QBR action loop. Illustrative data only; the operating logic is the proof.
- The product stopped being a place.On July 14, 2026 Salesforce, Clari + Salesloft, Glean, and SnapLogic all shipped a way for something that is not a person to use their software — and the only asset that survived the removal of the interface was the rule about who is allowed to read what.
- AI Redundancy Washing Has a Tell.Deutsche Bank's "AI redundancy washing" is now the defining feature of 2026's layoffs, and for senior analytics ICs the job postings from the same companies doing the cutting are a truer signal than the layoff tracker.
- BriefAcima — Data Scientist, Fraud Prevention & Risk AnalyticsA JD case study for Acima’s own fraud data-science role — the fraud decision waterfall (identity, velocity/device, the ML score), the hybrid rules+ML operating point, and the fraud-loss-vs-friction frontier. The one role in the set written from the inside: Acima’s lease-to-own funnel is the book I worked.
- The AI budget got a meterThe AI budget got a meter this fortnight. OpenAI shipped credit-level spend caps on June 18; Microsoft, Anthropic, and Databricks matched inside eighteen days. Four vendors moved AI spend out of the CFO's blind spot and onto the governance surface the CFO already reads — and moved themselves onto a consumption bill at the same time.
- The Free AI Trial Ended. The Bill Didn't.Databricks flipped Genie to metered billing today, Snowflake decoupled AI spend from compute in April, and Uber and Meta already blew through their 2026 AI budgets — the senior analytics IC who can build the cost-attribution query is the one explaining the invoice, not the one blindsided by it.
- The Week That Had No WeekendIn 1929 the Soviet Union tried to abolish the weekend. The nepreryvka split the workforce into five colour groups on a rotating five-day cycle — four-fifths always working, so the factories never stopped, and no universal Sunday to anchor religious life. The staggering fractured families: pick two people’s colours and watch their days off never line up. Traces the calendar from the five-day week to the six-day shestidnevka to the seven-day week’s return in 1940 — and debunks the two myths the story usually carries.
- When Sweden Vacations TogetherTerry Hartig tracked how many antidepressants Swedish pharmacists dispensed, month by month, for twelve years. The more workers were on vacation at the same time, the fewer prescriptions went out that month — and the effect reached retirees too, who had no job to break from. Evidence that rest is contagious. Rebuilt from the paper’s published ARIMA coefficients: an exact dose-response curve, the drop group-by-group, and a reconstruction of the raw seasonal series.
- The Agent-vs-Human ScorecardThe workbench measured on itself over a rolling 90-day window. Every task is tagged with who did it — agent or human — and this is the two-column readout of that split: outcome rate, dollars per instance, and minutes to complete. Fed live at build time from anonymized database views (see the dbt leak gate) that never expose a task title, note, or category.
- The SDR job got sold in pieces.HubSpot acquired Warmly on June 30, Salesforce paid $3.6 billion for Fin on June 15, Salesforce's Summer '26 shipped Momentum and a Customer Engagement Agent on June 15, and 6sense turned engaged-account lists into named CRM-ready contacts on June 22 — four moves this fortnight saying the sales rep's day stopped being the unit the software vendor priced against.
- ToolPipeline Coverage PlannerQuota, closed-won, open pipeline, and win rate in — coverage ratio, projected finish, and the pipeline you still have to build (in deals, per week) out. The quarter math, without the spreadsheet.
- ToolSales Capacity PlannerWill the team you have hit the number you signed up for? Reps, ramp, attainment, and attrition in — effective selling capacity, the gap to plan, and what it takes to close it.
- ToolComp Plan Payout CurveA comp plan is a curve, not a paragraph. OTE, pay mix, threshold, accelerator, and cap in — the whole plan drawn live, with total cash at attainment and what the next point is worth.
- ToolSaaS Metrics ScorecardThe five numbers a revenue leader gets asked for first — NRR, GRR, magic number, CAC payback, Rule of 40 — computed from raw inputs and scored against public benchmarks.
- Oracle's 10-K Said What the Press Releases Didn't.Oracle's fiscal 2026 10-K named AI as the direct cause of 21,000 layoffs this week, while PwC's 2026 AI Jobs Barometer confirmed a 62% wage premium for AI-skilled roles — together, two data points that answer the career question most senior analytics ICs have been putting off.
- The BI Brief Changed in June. The JD Hasn't.Microsoft Build 2026 shipped Agent Skills for Power BI — AI that writes reports from screenshots — and the $30K–$65K Fabric governance premium now has a visible job description gap behind it.
- Productivity Has Left Wages in the DustFor a generation the typical worker’s pay rose right alongside what they produced. Around 1973 the lines split — net productivity is up +298% since 1948, worker pay only +143% — and the wedge between them is income workers generated but didn’t take home. The setup for the obvious next question: will the AI productivity surge flow back to pay, or repeat the pattern? Fed by EPI’s State of Working America data.
- How Far CEO Pay Pulled AwayIn 1965 a big-company CEO made about 21 times a typical worker; the ratio peaked at 408:1 in 2021 and sits at 280:1 today. Because executive pay is mostly stock, the line swings with the market — toggle the S&P 500 overlay to see it track. The options-realized measure for the 350 largest U.S. firms, fed by EPI’s State of Working America data — then search a company you know for its own ratio, straight from its SEC proxy.
- The dashboard wrote itself.Microsoft open-sourced Fabric Skills for Claude and GitHub Copilot through the June Fabric Updates Blog, Databricks made Genie One GA at Data + AI Summit on June 16 with Unity Catalog Metrics turned into governed objects the agent drafts against, ThoughtSpot integrated Spotter with Snowflake Cortex AI and Semantic Views at Snowflake Summit 26 on June 2, and Sigma Agents went Public Beta on June 12 with MCP tool support — four BI vendors this fortnight stopped shipping the dashboard the analyst clicked and started shipping the agent that authors the model behind it.
- BriefPE portfolio — Applied AI Engineer (Forward-Deployed)The stretch goal: a forward-deployed AI engineer embedded across a PE portfolio. Honest that full-stack at staff depth is the reach — but the AI-native half (Claude Code, MCP servers, custom skills, context engineering, tool benchmarking, enablement) is my daily practice, and this whole site is the proof. The spine is reuse: build once, redeploy across the portfolio.
- Nuclear Weapon InventoryEvery nuclear warhead on Earth, year by year since 1945. The stockpile peaked at 64,452 in 1986 and has fallen 85% since — almost all of it the US and Russia dismantling Cold-War arsenals. Flip between total stockpile and the year-over-year buildup/teardown, overlay the arms-control treaties, and isolate any of the nine arsenals on a linked world map. Fed by an FAS/Our World in Data feed that refreshes year to year.
- BriefWealth-tech CRM — Sr RevOps Engineer (GTM Systems)The off-thesis one: a RevOps / GTM-systems role, not an analytics seat. Reframed around the part that’s hard to hire for — a trustworthy lead-to-revenue funnel with data quality and AI-native workflows on top — and honest about where Salesforce/CPQ admin depth is the ramp. The same full-funnel engine, pointed at a GTM stack.
- Every Staff Analytics JD Lists dbt. Here's What It Actually Does — and Why It's the Trust Layer.A field guide to the trust layer underneath every modern data stack — and why the job descriptions never explain it.
- Topology of MusicEvery song I’ve logged since 2019, rebuilt from Tableau as a “mountain range” of my top-15 artists. Not just who I played most, but who I stayed loyal to — each artist climbs for every return inside four days and dips when I let them lapse. deadmau5 never stops climbing.
- Mormon Pioneer Trek to the Salt Lake ValleyThe 56,000 Latter-day Saints who walked 1,300 miles to the Salt Lake Valley, rebuilt from Tableau as one themed dashboard. A young people’s migration (58% under 25), cholera as the trail’s defining killer, a U-shaped mortality curve — and the Company Type filter made real: pick Willie & Martin to watch mortality jump to 16.5%.
- Faith and Human Evolution: Mental GymnasticsForty-eight religious university students, read back two of their own contradictory survey answers — “Adam & Eve are our universal ancestors” and “humans share an ancestor with apes.” Half saw no conflict at all. Built from a public BYU interview-transcript deposit: the seven moves they use to hold both at once, and a wall of the transcripts verbatim (“we got our latest model, let’s, Adam and Eve let’s go”).
- BriefStart here — one engine, many rolesThe through-line behind the whole portfolio: one analytical engine — full-funnel, LTV, experimentation, exec scorecards, Voice-of-Customer — reskinned across competitor spotlights, JD case studies, and AI-enabled work.
- BriefSynchrony — VP, Co-Brand & Lifecycle AnalyticsA JD case study: the mandate reframed, a 90-day plan, a co-brand cardholder lifecycle funnel, and a requirement→proof map — the same lifecycle-analytics engine I built for Acima, pointed at a co-brand card book.
- BriefAffirm — Director, Analytics (Strategic Insights)A JD case study for Affirm’s Strategic Insights role — the BNPL consumer lifecycle and the Card-attach growth lever, with proof that pairs to my full Affirm competitor spotlight.
- BriefConcora Credit — VP, Risk (Fraud Strategy & Analytics)A JD case study for a subprime credit-card risk leader — the decisioning funnel (first-payment default, charge-offs, the approval/loss frontier), mapped to the Acima risk model I built. The closest fit in the set to that role’s actual day.
- BriefChime — Director, Product AnalyticsA JD case study for Chime’s Product Analytics role — the neobank member lifecycle, the direct-deposit activation unlock, and an experimentation-first 90-day plan, with proof mapped to the Dave spotlight.
- BriefAirbnb — Staff, Payments Advanced AnalyticsA JD case study for Airbnb’s Payments analytics role — the payment funnel, an authorization-rate causal experiment, and the same experimentation + exec-scorecard engine, pointed at money movement.
- BriefHeadspace — Director, AI EnablementA different kind of case study: this portfolio IS the proof. A dozen-plus sourced, cited analyses shipped via an AI research→build operating model I designed — discovery→pilot→scale, with responsible-AI guardrails on every page.
- BriefTarget — Director, Quantitative UX Research & AI EnablementA JD case study for Target’s Quantitative UX Research role — behavior-vs-voice measurement and a VoC research signal, mapped to my CX Research & Market Intelligence brief and AI-scaled research workflows.
- BriefBest Buy — Director, Customer Insights & IntegrationA JD case study for Best Buy’s Customer Insights role — the retail customer lifecycle and the channel-integration payoff, mapped to the lifecycle-analytics engine.
- BriefCitizens — Head of Decisioning Analytics & OptimizationA JD case study for Citizens’ decisioning role — the portfolio decision funnel optimized end-to-end against profitability, mapped to the decision-optimization engine.
- BriefCompetitor Spotlight: Progressive LeasingA deep-dive on Progressive Leasing / PROG Holdings (NYSE: PRG) — Acima’s purest pure-play mirror, the virtual-LTO rival Acima overtook on GMV in FY2025. Includes the $175M FTC settlement. Public data, every figure cited.
- BriefCompetitor Spotlight: DaveA deep-dive on Dave (NASDAQ: DAVE) — Brigit’s most direct competitor, already 2–3× its size, GAAP-profitable, with a banking flywheel Brigit lacks. Public data, every figure cited.
- BriefUpbound — Customer Performance AnalyticsInside Acima’s funnel: an interactive unit-economics & LTV model calibrated to the filed FY2025 results, a leakage diagnostic, an experimentation readout, and the SQL underneath. Public data only.
- BriefUpbound — Competitive & Market IntelligenceAn original market-intelligence briefing on Upbound Group (Acima, Rent-A-Center, Brigit) and the accessible-finance arena — lease-to-own vs BNPL vs cash advance. Every figure sourced and dated.
- BriefCompetitor Spotlight: AffirmA deep-dive on Affirm (NASDAQ: AFRM) — the no-late-fee, simple-interest, prime-leaning BNPL that sets the transparency benchmark high-take-rate lease-to-own is judged against. Public data, every figure cited.
- BriefCompetitor Spotlight: SezzleA deep-dive on Sezzle (NASDAQ: SEZL) — the subprime-leaning, super-app-building BNPL on a collision course with Acima and Brigit. Trajectory, business model, head-to-head, and implications. Public data, every figure cited.
- The Happiness ReportsThree reads on happiness and suicide. The paradox: why happy countries like Finland carry high suicide rates (after Gladwell), on a scatter + world map with a World Cup 2026 lens. Over time: a decade stacked against GDP, where the gap widened and a third of countries grew richer yet sadder. And the decline: world suicide rates fell nearly a fifth since 2000 — happiness never noticed.
- The platform shipped the badge.Four platform vendors stopped pitching the agent this fortnight and started shipping the badge it has to wear.
- The AI Feature Shipped. The PAM Interview Now Tests Whether You Can Measure It.Q2 is the measure quarter. Most social platforms shipped AI features in Q1 — personalized feeds, optimized ad delivery, AI-assisted tools — without finalizing how they'd be evaluated.
- The agent became a graph.Salesforce ships Multi-Agent Orchestration GA on June 15, ServiceNow Autonomous CRM names production volumes, Anthropic Claude Managed Agents goes multi-agent with Netflix in production, and a reliability paper measures the gap — four moves in one fortnight saying the AI feature stopped being a single LLM call.
- The Analytics Interview Changed This Month. Most Prep Is Still for Last Month.The dbt Developer Agent shipped this month, Meta and Shopify now allow AI in technical interviews, and Ravio's 2026 comp data documented a 12% AI/ML IC premium alongside a 73% collapse in entry-level analytics hiring. The interview changed. Most prep guides haven't.
- ToolOgden Home FinderA living catalogue of Ogden-metro housing — tracked daily with price history, days-on-market, and an interactive map. Rent today, for-sale next. Updated by a Claude scheduled task.
- The press release became a split test.Pinterest, Atlassian, Reddit, Anthropic, and CrowdStrike each printed an AI feature alongside a labeled lift number this fortnight — the same disclosure shape, written by five vendors who would not name each other.
- The Restructuring Wave Is Running Two Operations. Most Résumés Are Only Reading One.The May 2026 AI restructuring wave is cutting analytics roles at the mid-level and opening them at the senior IC tier simultaneously — and reading both signals off the same headlines is the week's first career move.
- ToolBrowser GIF & Meme MakerPanel layouts and caption templates for your own pictures, with Impact text you can drag anywhere — or turn a screen recording into a platform-sized GIF with trim, boomerang playback, filters, and client-side ffmpeg. Nothing is uploaded.
- The audit log became the moat.Salesforce printed Agentforce at $1.2B ARR, Snowflake bought Natoma, and Microsoft made Agent 365 mandatory at five agents — three vendors quietly naming the same moat: identity and audit at the tool-call level.
- ToolAI Feature Cost EstimatorSize the monthly bill for an LLM feature before you build it. Requests, tokens, and rates in — cost per request, monthly, and annual out.
- ToolEval Set SizerHow many golden examples do you actually need? Pick a target accuracy, a margin of error, and a confidence level — get the sample size.
- ToolProse Voice LinterPaste a draft. It flags the banned words, exclamation points, and passive voice, then checks the short-declarative rhythm — the exact house rules behind Signal and Crafting.
- ToolA/B Test CalculatorDrop in visitors and conversions for two variants to see lift, a p-value, and whether the result is real. Plus a planner for how many you need before you start.
- Analytics Leadership Has a Build Brief and a Scale Brief. They're Not the Same Interview.The analytics leadership pool is about to get bigger. Meta's notice periods clear in mid-June, and most of that clearance lands at the Director and Head of Analytics tier.
- The agent moved inside the suite.Anthropic shipped Claude inside Microsoft Office. SAP turned 200 workflows into agents. The standalone AI tab is being demoted; the integration is taking the seat.
- The Senior Analyst Brief Has Split. Most Résumés Address the Half That Isn't Hiring.The Senior / Staff Data Analyst title is running two separate job briefs right now. The product analytics version has been the default. The advertiser measurement version is the active hire.
- AI revenue is becoming a line item.Salesforce is about to break out Agentforce ARR as its own segment. Every competitor's CFO is drafting the same slide. The renewal sheet just grew a column.
- Social Platform RevOps Runs Two Books. Most Candidates Only Know One.Meta cleared the supply side. Snap, Pinterest, and Reddit are the demand side — and they're building something the Meta playbook doesn't cover.
- The dashboard stopped being the product.Four BI vendors moved the same direction last week. The semantic layer is the new product surface. The dashboard is the fallback.
- The Director Brief Has a New Question. Most Résumés Are Still Answering the Old One.Three weeks out from Snowflake Summit. The Director interview shifted from 'tell me about your stack' to 'tell me about a decision you changed.'
- Product Analytics Is the Q2 Hire. Here's What the Brief Now Requires.The companies that named AI revenue in Q1 now have a Q2 problem: proving it. That proof is a hiring event.
- The Cuts Are Priced In. The Build-Out Isn't.Meta's 8,000-person reduction is underway. The Q1 ad-platform prints sorted the sales-ops job market into two columns.
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