I Can Solve 70% of Any Analysis Before Opening the Data. Here’s How

“With age comes wisdom“— and the hiring teams out there didn’t quite tell you why experience makes a real difference.

Every analysis, at its core, is a question that is asked with a motive. Someone’s facing a problem, and you have been assigned to look into it and figure out a way to help. I have worked with so many analysts over the years and if someone asked me today, what’s the one thing that can really help an analyst accelerate growth in their careers, it would be this — thinking.

There are not many people who get this right, but every analysis usually has an answer hiding in the question. The world works systemically and analytics helps you simply ‘make sense’ of something that your data is telling you.

Imagine an ice cream shop that’s declining in sales; there could plausibly only be a few reasons why the decline is happening.

1. Did a competitor open a new store nearby?
2. Is it the onset of winter? ( valid point, but personally, I’d go to an ice cream store irrespective of the weather )
3. Did you increase the price of the ice creams?
4. Did you change any ingredients or take off a star item off your menu? etc.

As a business grows, everything has to align with a certain ‘way’ of working. Like the ice cream shop example, every business.. no matter how large or small, should operate as per some set expectations. It's a very rare occurrence that the ice cream shop has lower sales because a meteor hit the next building, and people see it as a bad omen to go to your store now.

An ice cream shop losing sales because summer is done, a streaming company losing out on viewers because the F1 season is over, a shoe company is increasing sales because an athlete put up a post appreciating their shoes, an older model of a phone reducing sales because your company released a newer model— it's all the same. It just makes sense! And once this is backed by data, you know you’re doing something right.

This is the core difference between a basic analyst and a good one and how I complete 70% of my work even before I touch the data.

You go through all these possible scenarios and keep your most likely possibilities at the top of your thoughts and start striking things out one after the other. Although this is what the difference maker is, there is definitely some background effort needed before you can execute this effortlessly.

1. Reaching out and talking to other analysts / stakeholders to understand how the business works
2. Not being restricted to just a single area of expertise in your business
3. Consistently practicing thinking of the ‘what if’ and ‘so what’ around every business problem
4. Asking yourself if the area being investigated actually concerns itself with the problem at hand

This takes months or even years to get right. But that’s the whole essence of expertise. You can complete analyses in your head and tell someone what’s happening purely based on years of working on the same thing. Trust me when I say it, there’s nothing more satisfying than knowing a problem inside out and thinking so hard about something that when you counter an LLM with petabytes of backend data, it tells you that you are right and are getting somewhere. That’s when you are a true analyst.

In a world driven by AI today and with our thinking being augmented by multiple AI models, there is only so much scope for us to start thinking about our problems with our creative brains and realizing that from a long-term perspective and for connecting the dots, its our collective thinking that will do it better than any AI model.

No doubt, I, like everyone else, use AI to think about things and have it answer things. But I don’t want it to get to an answer immediately. I love the grind of going through 50 different ‘What if’ scenarios and try it out in messy excel files before I can tell a stakeholder what’s really going wrong or right. One for everyone, AI can only help you think but not replace your thinking.

So if you’re in the same boat as me and have been an analyst through the pre-GPT era, you know how I feel. It was never about how good you can code or how fast you are with SQL / Excel. It was just about understanding the way things work.

If you’ve just started and this feels overwhelming, don’t worry — this is exactly what experience looks like from the inside. It’s not magic, it’s just consistency and reps. And the sooner you start thinking before you start doing, the faster you’ll get there.

I’m Yash — a Lead Analyst who’s spent years turning messy data into decisions that actually move businesses. I write about analytics the way nobody taught me — the thinking behind it, not just the tools. If that sounds like what you’ve been missing, stick around. There’s a lot more where this came from!

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