Most analytics teams are doing the wrong work.
Not because they're not talented. But somewhere along the way, they got pulled into building data lakes, running statistical models, and optimising job titles instead of answering the questions that actually matter to the business.
The result? Leadership stops trusting analytics. Business teams stop asking. And a team that could be driving strategy ends up maintaining spreadsheets.
This guide is about fixing that.
I've spent years at McKinsey's analytics arm, QuantumBlack, and in AI-focused private equity, and what I've built for clients across North America, Europe and APAC is a structured process for building analytics that leadership actually acts on.
This is that process.
How it works
The process is eight steps. Each one builds on the last, and together they take you from a blank page to a prioritised, business-aligned analytics roadmap.
We start by understanding what your business actually is — not how it describes itself in a strategy deck, but what it does and how it makes money. From there, we map the decisions that matter, identify where data can make those decisions better, and ruthlessly prioritise based on what will have the most impact and what you can actually build.
The steps are:
- Know the business you're in — Build a clear picture of the business using the Business Model Canvas.
- Map the decisions that matter — Map the customer journey and annotate it with the decisions that drive performance.
- Find out where the business is going — Get the strategic context that separates high-impact analytics from noise.
- Turn decisions into analytics opportunities — Generate and structure specific analytics opportunities.
- Score for business value — Score each use case for impact against the strategy.
- Map your data — Build a data map that connects your use cases to the data that would power them.
- Score for what you can actually build — Score each use case for data and capability feasibility.
- Build your roadmap — Sequence your work to maximise expected value.
At the end of the process you will have two things: a matrix that places every analytics opportunity by its business impact and build feasibility, and a phased delivery roadmap that sequences the work in an order leadership can fund and the team can deliver. Every item on the roadmap connects directly to the strategic priorities you identified early in the process — so nothing is on the list without a clear answer to why it matters right now.
Free tools to help you along the way
If you want to move faster, we've built free tools at platform.truestate.io/strategy that do the heavy lifting on the parts that would otherwise take days by hand.