Data analysts spend a lot of time studying businesses. We look at the numbers, identify trends, and make recommendations. But there’s a gap between reading about operations and actually running them — and that gap matters more than most people realize.
Building something — a product, a business, even a side project — closes that gap faster than anything else.
You Learn What Actually Gets Measured
When you’re inside a business, you quickly discover that the metrics that matter aren’t always the ones that are easy to track. Conversion rate sounds simple until you realize you have three different definitions of “conversion” depending on who you ask. Customer satisfaction is a single number in the dashboard and a mess of conflicting signals in reality.
Building something forces you to decide what to measure and why. That decision-making process teaches you more about metric design than any textbook.
Stakeholders Become Real
One of the persistent weaknesses in purely analytical roles is abstracting away the human context. “The user” or “the customer” becomes a row in a table.
When you’ve dealt with actual customers — handled their questions, addressed their complaints, won their repeat business — you understand why certain metrics move in certain ways. Customer lifetime value isn’t just a formula. It’s the cumulative result of dozens of small experiences.
You Develop Intuition for What’s Off
After operating a business, I can look at someone’s data and often sense when a number doesn’t feel right. Not because I’m doing complex analysis, but because I have a reference point for what a normal range looks like, what seasonality tends to do to different metrics, what a data collection problem looks like versus a real business trend.
That intuition isn’t something you can build purely by running queries. It comes from living inside the numbers.
You Learn to Prioritize
Businesses force prioritization. You can’t do everything, so you learn quickly which levers actually move outcomes and which activities feel productive but aren’t. That skill — ruthless prioritization — translates directly into better analysis. Not every metric deserves equal attention. Not every question is worth answering.
What to Build
It doesn’t have to be big. A weekend project, a freelance engagement, a small business on the side — the scale matters less than the accountability. You need enough real stakes that you actually care whether the thing works.
The goal isn’t to become an entrepreneur. The goal is to understand what it’s like to make decisions under uncertainty with incomplete data, which is what every stakeholder you’ll ever work with is doing every single day.
This post was shaped by my experience building Felt Pressure Washing and the inventory management projects on this site.