What to ask your agency about analytics engineering
Most teams know this matters. Fewer have decided who owns it. If you are briefing an agency or a freelancer on analytics engineering, these questions are worth asking early.
Most data problems are ownership problems that turned into technical ones. Write the reasoning down alongside the decision, because the reasoning is what changes first.
Questions worth asking
- Who will actually do this work, and have they done it before?
- How will we know afterwards whether it worked?
- What happens if it needs changing in a year?
- What are you assuming that we have not confirmed?
What a good answer sounds like
Transformations belong in version control like any other code. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.
One definition of a metric, used everywhere. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.
The short version
Data outlives the applications built on top of it, which is why the model deserves more thought than the screens. Three things worth confirming about analytics engineering before you move on:
- Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
- One definition of a metric, used everywhere — and you know whether that is true here
- There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped
Pick the one that would hurt most if it failed, and start there.