A day with a Business Analyst at Jellysmack
This week, I am happy to celebrate my seventh month at Jellysmack as a Business Analyst! It is a great opportunity to tell you about it. First, how I got there — spoiler alert, it was not mapped out. Then, the questions that keep driving my work all day long. And finally, what it means to be a Business Analyst at Jellysmack in my opinion. I hope you will enjoy reading it!
How did I become a Business Analyst at Jellysmack?
My round-the-clock questions
Illustrating how the question drives the choice of graph(s)
A graph should always answer a question in a clear way. To do so, I try to dissect what is at stake in the question and search which graph(s) would be the most relevant to address it.
Let’s take concrete and simple examples to illustrate this with the following dataset: revenues by country by month for a given YouTube Jellysmack channel in 2020.
If the question is:
In how many countries did we earn revenues in 2020?
For me, this question is of the same type than “How old are you?”. We expect a straightforward answer: XX. So, no need to complicate, let us use the card graph.
If the question is:
What was the evolution of revenues in the second half of 2020?
We just want a trend, a general idea of how the revenues evolved through the second half of 2020. A line chart is perfect for that. If we want to go into details and start comparing months, a vertical bar chart would be more relevant.
If the question is:
What are the 3 countries where we earned the most revenues in 2020?
The objective of the question is to rank this top 3. When talking about a top 3, I always think about an Olympic podium but maybe we could add another information here, leveraging the delta between those 3 countries. A bar chart feels natural to do so. I tend to use vertical bar chart when the X-axis is a time metric: we are used to reading it this way. I prefer to use a horizontal bar chart in any other cases.
If the question is:
How much did these 3 countries account for on total revenues on the 3rd quarter of 2020? the 4th quarter of 2020?
We need to isolate the top 3 from the rest of the countries and tell at one glance that these account for XX% of total revenues. We are also interested in having a comparison between 3rd and 4th quarter of 2020. I do not like pie charts so instead I would opt for a 100% stacked bar chart which address the two stakes of the question: the fact that the chart is stacked to a 100% helps us compare visually values from top 3 and from other countries because we have a consistent baseline on both right and left. Some data transformations are needed to do so.
To sum up, the questions asked here were voluntarily simple to illustrate the point. The business questions received are much more complex and call for other questions. The result is several graphs put in a Power BI report. In the example taken above, the report would look like this:
What it means to be a Business Analyst at Jellysmack in my opinion
Feel like you could be a Business Analyst at Jellysmack? Do not hesitate to apply here!
