The six sessions 🎯 · from "our numbers never match" to a brief she can read
The running case is Harbourline, an invented chain of 38 pharmacy and clinic outlets across Singapore and Malaysia, and its operations director Adeline Tan, who has never heard the word pipeline. Every fact on her sheet is printed in the bench's bank file; the course claims the mechanism, never the numbers as facts about pharmacies.
The gap, from the engineer's chair
Why "our numbers never match" is two systems answering two questions, the data-state door opened widest, and why one outcome question still goes first: the facts behind door 4 need trust.
🗺️ Session 2 · coreEvery system a number passes through
The till, the bank, the ledger, the spreadsheet, the phone. Who owns each, who can log in, how often each is read, and which copy gets declared real. You draw the lineage from her answers.
🎛️ Session 3 · bench nightThe engineer's questions, and the bench
Five kinds of question and the same operations director run five ways. The fast interview scores 17 and writes down "the POS is the source of truth"; the doors in order 47; data state widest, 51.
💬 Session 4 · coreTeaching while you ask
The one concept worth ninety seconds in an engineer's meeting: most mismatches are timing, not truth. Twelve teach-back lines rewritten for a person who has never heard of a pipeline.
🌱 Session 5 · coreThree projects, starting with one real copy
Her pains become three candidates, each starting by declaring one copy real, and the winner is a written month-end bridge from the export the bookkeeper already sends: no new tool, no admin login, an answer for the auditor.
📄 Session 6 · capstoneThe mock meeting and the one-page brief
A full run on the bench with your own sheet, scored, then the brief she can read: the lineage as five boxes, the one real copy, the auditor's date. Final scorecard.
Your passport 🎫
Clear all three quiz questions in a session and it gets stamped. Six stamps means you can walk into a meeting with a business person who knows nothing about data, leave with the decision, the current way and the real data state, and send a brief she can read the next morning. Stamps live in this browser only.
Four chairs at the same table 🪑
The same framework, the same company and the same bench engine, built four times for four roles. Each course marks a different door to open widest and carries its own question bank and fact sheet. The framework itself lives in the data analyst course's session 1; this course links to it.
What this is not, so you land in the right place 🧭
| If your question is | Go here instead |
|---|---|
| I am the executive. How do I read a number with confidence and brief an analyst? | Data Literacy ↗ |
| I have been handed a question. How do I sharpen it and say what the data can and cannot answer? | Data Thinking ↗ |
| How do I present findings, handle a room, and influence a decision? | Communication ↗ |
| How do I run product discovery as a discipline, week after week? | Product Thinking ↗ |
| How do I frame a decision properly, with options, evidence and a call? | Decision Intelligence ↗ |
| What is a data maturity model, and how do I run a real assessment? | Governance 101 ↗ |
| I am the data person. I have 45 minutes with a business person who knows nothing about data, and I need to leave with something I can build. | you are in the right place |
The first meeting, run by the data side. The decision, the current way and the real data state, got out of a person in words that teach her something as she answers. Reading numbers, sharpening a handed question, presenting, and discovery as a product discipline are each taught once, in the course that owns them, and linked from here rather than repeated.
Choose your path 🗺️
Three doors into the same conviction: the way of asking, not the person across the table, decides what you leave with.
What is honest here 🧾
The company is invented and says so on every page that uses it. The bench is counted from a printed file. Where a page rests on a book or a paper, it says which and how it was read, and where a widely quoted number could not be traced, the page says that instead of quoting it.
| Claim | Status |
|---|---|
| Harbourline, Adeline Tan, and every fact on her sheet | Constructed. Written to be typical of a mid-size retail chain; printed in full in the bench's bank file; never a claim about a real business |
| Every count on the bench: net value, false beliefs, doors, the 20-minute counter | Really computed in your browser from the printed bank, and verified headlessly in node before any page quoted a number |
| Tappers and listeners: about 50 percent predicted, 3 of 120 named | Reported from Heath and Heath, Made to Stick (2007), citing Newton's 1990 Stanford dissertation, which was not read at source |
| Measurement as a reduction of uncertainty about a decision | Hubbard, How to Measure Anything (2014), definition as it appears across summaries; the book was not opened here |
| Ask about the past, not the future; people say yes to be polite | Fitzpatrick, The Mom Test (2013). Only his verified wording is quoted; a paraphrase that circulates as a quote is not |
| The analytics translator role and its predicted headcount | Role named from the 2018 HBR article; the headcount figure was not read at source and is not quoted |
The knowledge map 🧠
The whole course at a glance - hover a session to spotlight its concepts, click any node to jump in.