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The Library
Everything from The Auction Block you can use on Monday morning. Find the pitfall you are standing in, read the principle that answers it, and take the first step.
Pitfalls & principles
57 cards, all free
Each card names a pitfall or a principle, shows it in practice, and gives you steps to take on Monday morning.
Ten named frameworks
The vocabulary from the book, defined
Each framework gets a one-sentence definition, the real story behind it, and what to do about it Monday morning.
Manufacturing Mindset
The Manufacturing Mindset treats data work as factory work — measuring throughput, cycle time, waste, and yield instead of counting deliverables.
Usage Is the Receipt
Usage Is the Receipt means the only proof an analytics product worked is whether people actually use it — adoption is the receipt, everything else is a claim.
The 70% Confidence Principle
The 70% Confidence Principle means shipping a directional answer at 70% confidence and learning fast, instead of chasing 95% certainty while the business waits.
Build That!
Build That! means validating ideas with a mockup people can react to before writing requirements — the picture is the spec, not a document nobody can quite picture.
Data Tables as Hieroglyphics
Data Tables as Hieroglyphics is the argument that cryptic schema names like fact_trx_dtl_v3 are gatekeeping dressed up as rigor, not a technical necessity.
Medallion Architecture Disdain
Medallion Architecture Disdain argues that Bronze/Silver/Gold layer naming describes processing stage, not content — call it the Paint Department instead, a name that tells you what happens there.
The AI Hype Cycle Trap
The AI Hype Cycle Trap is building the impressive AI demo instead of the boring, high-value fix — because demo success and production value are not the same thing, and the gap between them is where budgets go to die.
The Four E's
The Four E's — Engagement, Experience, Effectiveness, Efficiency — describe the order analytics maturity actually moves through, and the order is non-negotiable: chase efficiency before anyone is engaged and you optimize something nobody uses.
Ecosystems Over Products
Ecosystems Over Products means building an interconnected system of analytics assets that reference and reinforce each other, instead of a pile of isolated dashboards and models that each stand alone.
It Was Never About the Tech
It Was Never About the Tech is the observation that analytics transformations fail on politics, people, and principles far more often than on tooling — the technology is rarely the binding constraint.
Where do you stand as an analytics leader?
20 questions. 6 dimensions. Get a personalized profile of your analytics leadership — mapped to the pitfalls and principles from The Auction Block.
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The Dashboard That Broke Everything
Read the opening chapter of The Auction Block — free.
Sarah Chen stared at the email for the third time, willing the words to rearrange themselves into something that made sense. They didn’t. The subject line read: “Dashboard Audit Results — URGENT” and beneath it, a number that made her stomach drop.
Forty-seven.
Forty-seven active dashboards across the analytics organization she’d inherited three weeks ago. She’d expected a mess — the job description had practically screamed “fixer needed” — but forty-seven dashboards for a company with eight product lines was a special kind of chaos.
Continue reading in the book...
📝 Essay Preview
The Manufacturing Mindset
From Part 2 of The Auction Block — the leadership essays.
I was standing on a factory catwalk in Minneapolis, watching a production line that had been running for decades, when it hit me: everything I was trying to fix in analytics had already been solved — just in a different building.
The factory floor below me was a masterpiece of systems thinking. Raw materials entered on one end. Finished products came out the other. Every step was visible, measurable, and improvable. Bottlenecks had names. Waste had categories. And the people doing the work could actually see the whole system, not just their piece of it.
Then I walked back to my office and looked at our analytics org. Same company. Same building, even. But a completely different universe. Work entered from every direction — Slack messages, emails, hallway conversations, executive texts. Nobody could see the full queue. Nobody knew what was actually in progress versus stuck. And the “finished products” — our dashboards, analyses, and models — often disappeared into the void with no feedback on whether they actually helped anyone make a better decision.
The full essay continues in the book...
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The book includes 15 chapters, 4 leadership essays, and the principles behind every card. Available on Kindle, in paperback and in hardcover.
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