I’ve spent a career deep in the world of BI… reporting, dashboards, and the endless mission to help businesses “make better decisions”. But what happens when you stand this world next to marketing? The side of the business that’s often living five years ahead of BI in how they squeeze every drop of value from data?
In this episode, Carl and I sat down with John Conway, who’s lived through every twist in the marketing playbook: from econometrics and direct mail to AI-driven segmentation at scale. John’s journey is a reminder that the best data work is rarely neat and linear, it’s messy, iterative, full of triangulation and experiments that don’t always work the first time (or the second).
We got into a lot! I called it a knowledge bomb in the call and it really was, we covered:
How marketing analytics leans heavily on “triangulation” and piecing together messy signals to spot what’s real and what’s noise.
The traps BI teams fall into when they assume building dashboards alone creates action.
Why experiments, not just reports, are how marketers push businesses to act.
What happens when AI tools promise shortcuts but fail to replicate real-world results, and how the same old principles of testing and measurement still matter.
The takeaway for me was this: we talk a lot in BI about “actionable insights”, but maybe it’s marketing people who really live that phrase daily. And the catch? Action only happens when you fight for it. The best insights won’t execute themselves.
If you’re in BI, data science or analytics and wondering what the next step looks like, maybe you don’t need another dashboard. Maybe you need to get better at running experiments, showing impact, and doing the unglamorous work of stitching messy signals into decisions the business actually cares about.
You can find John several places:
Linked In: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/chief-data-hero
Substack: https://substack.com/@chiefdatahero
You Tube: https://www.youtube.com/@MLs-like-teen-spirit
We’d love to hear your stories:
How have you brought an “experimental mindset” into BI? Have you faced the same tension between reporting and real change? Drop us a reply or share it in the comments.
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