Whiteboard space is at a premium in my office, but I’m always willing to erase a section to brainstorm a potential solution to new problems—afterall if we can visually create a “product” that provides insight, we can work backward and determine what data we need to produce that work.

I read Steven Covey’s book The 7-Habits of Highly Effective People well over a decade ago; however, “Begin with the End in Mind” has stuck with me as I’ve worked on various projects since that first reading. Currently, I’m working on several data-driven activities that remind me why this habit is so important.

Data Analysis (and Data Science) are hot topics, but too often folks want to jump right in and start crunching numbers—”Let’s run an X test on the Y samples and calculate the Z results.” It is easy to create large datasets that miss the mark and become wasted effort. While it may be hard, we need to get everyone to step back and ask the simple questions: “What problem are we trying to solve?” “What will this look like when we are ‘done’?”