To meet this certification criterion, you’ll need to go beyond just reporting your findings, you’ll need to show how your work connects to real business impact. This means choosing a meaningful metric, explaining why it matters, and showing how it can be used to track progress in the future.
To meet the expectation, your report should:
- Choose a clear metric that reflects business success. This should be something useful for the whole business, not just the data team. For example: sales growth, profitability over three years, or customer retention.
- Explain why you picked this metric: How does it help the business know if things are improving? Why is it a good measure of success for this problem?
- Use the data you’ve been given to show a baseline: If you’re tracking the proportion of product sales, show what that looks like in the current data.
Submissions fall short when:
- They use statistical metrics like standard error as the business goal. (Those are useful, but they’re not how the business measures success.)
- There’s no clear metric at all, or too many metrics that don’t clearly tie to a business goal.
- There’s no baseline shown using the current data, so it’s unclear where the business is starting from.
- The metric isn’t explained, so we don’t know why it was chosen or how it helps measure success.
Your job here is to connect the data work to the bigger picture. Pick a metric that the business cares about, explain why it matters, use data to show where things stand now, and make sure it’s something that can be tracked moving forward.