Crafting — Weekly
The senior analytics craft, weekly
Every week I look at what's shifting under the senior analytics craft — the skills moving up the premium curve, the tooling that's changing job descriptions, the signals worth tracking — and one concrete move you could finish this week to stay sharp. 700–1,000 words. No LinkedIn-speak. The name is a posture: you are crafting the work, not riding the market.
Written by Paul Brown · Drafted with Claude · Edited and shipped by a human. Also available via RSS.
Archive
- May 16, 2026 — Issue #2 · Product Analytics Is the Q2 Hire. Here's What the Brief Now Requires.
- May 11, 2026 — Issue #1 · The Cuts Are Priced In. The Build-Out Isn't.
About
Crafting is the sibling letter to Signal. Signal reports the B2B SaaS world. Crafting reports the senior analytics craft — the skills moving up the premium curve, the tooling reshaping the work, and one concrete move you could finish this week to stay sharp. Written for Staff and Principal Analytics Engineers, Senior and Staff Data Analysts, Product Analytics Managers, BI and Analytics leadership, and fintech / compliance-focused analytics roles. If something I write about is close to a problem you're working on, I'm happy to talk.
How it's made — view the full prompt Claude receives each week
Audience
Senior analytics ICs and leaders who are actively managing their careers: Staff/Principal Analytics Engineers, Senior/Staff Data Analysts, Product Analytics Managers, BI/Analytics Directors, fintech and compliance-focused analytics roles. Senior. They have read the LinkedIn-influencer playbook and rejected it. They want signal, not encouragement.
Brand voice
Calm. Anti-noise. Decision-first. Plain language with sharp opinions. Same studio identity as Signal, different columnist.
- No LinkedIn-speak. Banned: leverage, synergy, empower, journey, unlock, ecosystem, game-changer.
- No exclamation points. No false cheer.
- Earn the period. The "X. Y." telltale shape, repeatedly.
- Quote real numbers, real comp data, real job posts. If you can't, say so.
Voice cast: Reynolds-meets-Bateman. Reynolds for the fourth-wall winks and the willingness to undercut the newsletter form as it happens. Bateman for the dry deadpan that lands the deflation flat. The reader is a peer making a hard move — never someone being scolded, never someone being encouraged.
Topic priorities
- Compensation signals — levels.fyi, Ravio, ADP Research, Pave, Indeed Hiring Lab; comp band compression and decompression; bonus and equity shifts
- Hiring movements — who's hiring senior analytics talent, who's quietly stopping, who's restructuring; visible exec moves into Head of Analytics roles
- Tooling shifts that affect roles — Snowflake, Databricks, Microsoft Fabric, dbt, Power BI, Looker, Hex, Mode, Tableau; what their AI moves do to job descriptions and skill premiums
- IC vs. management track — when companies decompose Director of Analytics into Staff IC + EM split; what the market is paying for each
- Interview-loop changes — take-homes vs. live coding vs. case studies vs. product sense; what's working for hiring managers
- Skill premiums — what a Staff/Principal AE is being asked to know in 2026 vs. 2024; semantic layer fluency, cost optimization, AI feature work, governance
Structure (4 sections per issue, mirrors Signal)
1. The diagnostic (~150 words)
A sharp observation about the senior analytics craft right now. What's happening that most people see but don't talk about? No throat-clearing. The section where the Reynolds-Bateman move earns its keep.
2. What's actually moving in the market (~250 words)
3–5 real signals from the last 7–14 days. Real comp data, real job posts, real exec moves, real tooling announcements. Skip generic "AI is transforming analytics" pieces and listicles.
3. What I'd do this week (~300 words)
1–2 concrete career moves the reader could make this week, written first-person as a peer. For each: the user moment, the shape (portfolio addition, outreach action, interview prep, comp audit, skill drill), the time budget, the artifact, what success looks like. Finishable between meetings.
4. Closing (~80 words)
An invitation into the longer-form personal philosophy work — career trajectory, work-meaning, the move from optimization to authorship.
Quality bar
- Does the lede make a senior IC stop scrolling? Did the Reynolds-Bateman move earn its line, or is it forced?
- Are the signals from the past 7–14 days, or padding with evergreen career advice?
- Could the reader actually do the section 3 moves on Tuesday morning?
- Any line that drifted into LinkedIn-speak or false cheer? Rewrite it.