What does a data analyst do?

- I am sure you can imagine some of the business questions that stakeholders ask the data analytics team. For example, what is our monthly revenue by customer and product? Which customers have the best success with our product and why? How can we maximize the success of our marketing campaign by targeting users? Can we predict which users will churn after their subscription expires? Is there a live report that the sales team can customize and export for their clients? These are just a few examples of some of the exciting problems data analysts get to solve for their stakeholders. Think about your own work. What questions do you have that you're trying to answer? As you can see, business questions can range in complexity, but the common denominator between them all is that they all need data to back up their answers. Being able to digest these business questions into data-derived insights and translate them back to the stakeholders is a key part of analytics. Let's be honest. A lot of the time, stakeholders don't even really know what they want or what they need to do. They just come to the analytics team with a problem and aren't sure how to tackle it. This is where data analyst expertise comes into play. A data analyst is able to take business problems from stakeholders and frame them into a problem that can be solved with data. This includes figuring out what data is needed, how the data can be used, and what the best solution is to solve the business problem. After coming up with a solution, it's a data analyst's job to translate the results to the stakeholder in a way that can be easily understood. Most of the time, the final deliverable is a PowerPoint, a dashboard, a report, an Excel file, or even sometimes just a simple number or percentage. It's vital that the final result not only informs the stakeholder of the solution, but also how to act on it. Insights are great, but actionable insights are even better. An average day as a data analyst involves collaborating with stakeholders to understand business needs, working with your peers and manager to iterate on a solution, writing queries in SQL, building visualizations in Power BI or Tableau, and driving decisions with your results. Of course, technical skills in coding are a big part of analytics, but a lot of your time as a data analyst is spent in meetings working with stakeholders, framing problems and understanding the data in the context of the business, so don't underestimate this part of the job. Lots of these skills are built over time with experience. I know you're excited to learn all of the super fun technical skills. We'll dig into some of those in the next chapter. But for now, let's learn a little more about the field of analytics so we can truly understand what the job entails before jumping into the technical side.