As an analyst, your job isn’t just to crunch numbers, it’s to guide your audience through an airtight investigation. Ditch the flood of dashboards, charts, and raw metrics. When you overwhelm, you lose them. Instead, break complexity into progressive, deliberate, and digestible steps. Build your case like evidence in a trial, each point reinforcing the…
Author: Marine Morales
My Essential Project Planning Shopping Cart
When I joined a big tech company as a sales analyst, I had to audit the BI and propose ideas to develop it. Structuring this audit and the resulting development project felt like a chaotic shopping trip. I’d grab slides from past presentations, borrow templates from different teams, and piece together documents just to figure…
Crack your Case Like an FBI Analyst: Secure the Win and Lock it Down
A few nights ago, I was watching Law & Order SVU when a scene cut to Morales, the FBI analyst, briefing the team on data he’d pulled from a suspect’s spreadsheet. As he walked them through it, he didn’t bury them in jargon. He made the numbers feel urgent and the data tools matter. That…
Mary Anning, the 19th-Century Paleontologist Who Teaches us about Modern Analytics
When we think of pioneers in data analysis, we often envision statisticians, machine learning engineers, and analysts diligently working through intricate datasets. However, after reading about Mary Anning, the 19th-century fossil hunter known for inspiring the tongue twister “she sells seashells by the sea shore,” I was struck by how her work exemplifies the core…
Crack your Case Like an FBI Analyst: Turn your Evidence into a Compelling Narrative
A few nights ago, I was watching Law & Order SVU when a scene cut to Morales, the FBI analyst, briefing the team on data he’d pulled from a suspect’s spreadsheet. As he walked them through it, he didn’t bury them in jargon. He made the numbers feel urgent and the data tools matter. That…
Beyond Categorization: Rethinking the Partner Scoring Model
As a data analyst working in a tech company, I was tasked with developing a scoring system to rank our business partners worldwide based on past performance and future potential. The goal was to support planning targets and budget allocation, ensuring that resources were directed toward the most valuable partners. At the time, we lacked…
The Pareto Principle of Leadership: What I’ve Learned from the People in Charge
Early in my career, I briefly worked with a manager who completely reshaped my understanding of leadership. She wasn’t the most technically proficient, she often relied on the team for understanding financial modeling, identifying key priorities, and even preparing PowerPoint presentations. She wasn’t particularly skilled in things I once believed defined good management in finance,…
My Playbook for B2B Market Growth
During my time supporting quarterly marketing and sales planning, I was responsible for overseeing and validating targets and budget allocation, program strategies, and then ensuring their successful implementation along the quarter. A process known as building and executing the Playbook in the tech industry. To effectively support this mission, I had to develop a 360°…
Crack your Case Like an FBI Analyst: Build a Bulletproof Analysis
The other night, I was watching Law & Order SVU when a scene cut to Morales, the analyst. It was funny, because that’s my name too … Well the analyst was briefing the team on critical data he’d pulled from a suspect’s USB key. It was an Excel spreadsheet. But Morales didn’t just dump a…
Webs or Tentacles? Why Data Analysts Should Ditch the Spider Mindset for an Octopus Brain
I’m not a big comic book fan, but the other night, I was rewatching the first Spider-Man trilogy with Tobey Maguire — the only Spider-Man trilogy Millenials will aknowledge. And while I enjoyed the nostalgia, one thing kept bothering me: Doctor Octopus should have won. Think about it. He had four extra mechanical limbs, allowing…