I was dependable. You asked, you got something back. Fast.
"What was CAC last month?" Answered.
"Pull signups by channel?" On your desk before lunch.
"Why did Tuesday's conversion dip?" Twenty minutes, hang tight.
Responsiveness felt like the job. Quick turnaround, nothing too trivial, always reachable. What I'd actually become was a search bar with a heartbeat. The questions never grew, because I never grew them – and half a year in it hit me: nobody had once asked what I thought. They asked me to go fetch.
The wake-up call was a quarterly review, where the head of growth walked everyone through "his" insight – a pattern I'd spotted in the data a quarter earlier and never said out loud. I had the finding. He had the floor. Same data – he brought a point of view, I brought a result set.
So I quit being on-demand:
- I open every week with one question nobody requested – the leak, the cohort bleeding out quietly, the channel collecting credit it never earned.
- When someone wants a number, they get the number and then the "and here's what it's really telling you."
- I started turning down the pulls that were pure curiosity, to keep room for the ones attached to real money.
Answering questions makes you handy. Asking the right ones makes you someone people watch.
The reactive analyst is the easiest line on the budget to cut. The one setting the agenda gets handed the chair.
If your whole week is inbound, that isn't a workload issue. It's a positioning one.
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