How can you leverage data to strategically grow your digital product? If that question interests you, this newsletter is about exploring it from different angles – product management, data engineering, data science and data-driven strategy.

Happy Monday!

Hey, welcome to our new newsletter. How did you get here, you ask? Well there’s an easy answer to that: as subscribers to some of our older newsletters, we decided to take you in on this new one as we’re really hoping that you might find this one valuable too.

But…

If learning about data-driven digital products is not especially your cup of tea, no worries. Simply click on the Unsubscribe button at the bottom of this email and please, no hard feelings.

For the rest of you!

As you might have guessed, we want to talk about everything analytics as it relates to managing and growing a digital product. We’ll talk about data engineering, customer analytics, product performance, product-market fit and KPIs, and all that good stuff.

We settled on an initial format, but this thing will definitely evolve as the weeks go by (we plan on sending a new edition every 2 weeks). Hope you like it! And if you do, it’d be cool if you could share with others that might be interested in what we’ll discuss here. If you don’t, drop me a line and tell me why.

So on that, let’s get that newsletter rolling!

What Had Us Excited

Here at Lantrns Analytics, we love dbt. It’s our tool of choice for ETL work, as it is powerful, easy to use and just plain fun.

Well, the guys at Fishtown Analytics who supports dbt, just released a new version of dbt, as well as a cloud service to support the automated execution of dbt projects.

Although both those announcements are great news in themselves, what’s really exciting is how this approach to ETL is really taking off. There are a number of principles behind dbt that just plainly makes sense. Such as having SQL as the glue that holds together all components from any modern analytical stack. Or just the DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) principle – write business logic once and re-use it everywhere. That this open-source project is being adopted by so many is just good news for anyone who wants to build stacks that are modern, flexible and scalable.

If curious, we wrote a blog post where we introduce in great details what dbt is and how to use it in a project. Hope you enjoy it!

What Made The News

Google being slapped by French regulator for GDPR violators.

Ok, actually news from 2 weeks ago, but it’s important. Especially if you’re an online market / product that captures data from your customers / users. You need consent if they’re Europeans. It’s part of Europe’s big regulation on privacy. It was all theory up until now, but…

Google has been fined 50 million Euros for their violations of privacy laws. Not much, but it’s a symbol for whoever is dealing with Europeans as customers of their online product / market that this thing is true and should be taken seriously.

And yes, we did write about how companies should prepare for GDPR late in 2017. Well, this is still relevant if you haven’t taken appropriate actions for this yet.

Blog Post We Enjoyed

The Evolution of Analytics With Data, by Deepesh Nair

To deeply understand a subject, it’s essential to know its history. How it started, how it evolved and where it’s heading. It’s the same with analytics and how it has been used since the beginning by companies, to gain a competitive edge.

This blog post is a great and fairly quick read to wrap your head around what’s the current state of business analytics and how it will be evolving.

What I do find interesting is that some still think that to do analytics requires what is defined in its 1.0 form – that data should be stored in big proprietary data warehouses owned by the technological mammoths of the world. But it simply isn’t the case anymore.

With cloud services such as AWS and Google Cloud, we now have access to modular services, including data warehouse solutions such Redshift and BigQuery that breaks us free from those walled gardens. The infrastructure supporting analytics has evolved greatly by being much more flexible than before, can deliver insights almost in real-time, and it’s sooooo much cheaper too. And this is what allows a company to evolve through further phases of analytics (predictive analytics and personalization anyone?).

So interesting tidbits to be taken from this blog post. Hopefully it will provide some interesting ideas for you when considering how to better leverage your data to grow your product.

See You In 2 Weeks

Well that’s it for now. Hopefully this has been a valuable read to you and if you do think it might be valuable to someone else, why not push that little Forward button at the top of your mail app 🙂

Another edition will be sent in 2 weeks. Until then, happy data-driven product development!

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