Analytical Skills for AI and Data Science

Chapter 3. Learning to Ask Good Business Questions

Chapter 2 provided a quick overview of the general framework we’ll be developing in the upcoming chapters. Since our ultimate objective is to translate business problems into prescriptive solutions, we should start learning how to ask the right questions. I hope it doesn’t come as a surprise that learning to frame the questions can have an impact comparable in magnitude to adopting the techniques that will follow.

We also introduced a very simple technique that I’ve found quite useful to understand what we really want to accomplish: the sequence of why questions. You start by questioning what you think you are trying to accomplish, then move up one level or stop when you are convinced that the business objective is in fact just right. In our voyage to find prescriptive solutions, it is of the utmost importance to guarantee that we are tackling the right objectives. One nice byproduct that will be quite handy in Chapter 4 is that this usually enlarges the set of possible actions or levers we have. This is usually the case when we start by questioning an action and the procedure ends up taking us to the metrics we really want to affect. It is almost natural, then, to question if there are other actions that can be used to impact the same objective.

In this chapter, we will delve a bit more into some of the best practices when asking good business questions; understand the difference between descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive ...