Timo Dechau

Silent mode for some weeks and plenty of refactoring for the tracking plan generator. Major change, swapped Supabase for Convex and Sonnet 3.7 for 4.0. It generated this for a Miro use case:

Puh - the new Propagandhi album is going deep... Really good, but completely different from what I thought it would be.

Good day - part 2. First successful deployment of the home-built course platform. Some more tests, and we can move the people from Circle to it.

Good day - I generated the first test tracking plan via the app. My usual test case: Miro. 30s, 6 entities, 38 events (maybe a bit too many), 45 properties. Quality - quite close to my manual designs. Next step - make the table look nicer.

Incremental with SQLmesh - oh la la.

I guess my version of midlife crisis is thinking about buying band shirts again - I know a mild version. Talking to Johan van de Werken (not if you are on BS) does not help.

Ok, I am pushing it now - create tracking plans with multiple models, synthetize and do cherry picking to get your perfect tracking plan. But beware, I will show warnings when create more than 20 events. This is an opinionated software.

It looks so innocent in that stage - I could keep it for simplicity like this - but there is this urge for individual UI that cannot be controlled.

I really enjoyed Juliana's latest post about unit economics - julianajackson.substack.com/p/unit-econo...

Unit economics is the adult version of analytics.

This pixel art was already worth working on a course withJuliana J. We plan to launch a course with the monumental title: Strategic Analytics. Join the waitlist here: lp.timodechau.com/strategic_an...

Something I always wanted to have in a tracking plan tool: auto-population of descriptions and examples. Now I added it to the HipsterDataPlan. My current optimization metric is time to the v1 version of a tracking plan. This saves me 30-60m easily.

Ok, a year ago, I would have said a definite no to building a tracking plan/setup tool. But things have changed. I now have a way to generate really high-quality tracking plans with GenAI, so now I'll build the frontend for it. I'll keep you posted.

@evidence.dev @hughess.bsky.social - Your Slack channel can only be joined with an evidence email address. I have some questions about chaining source sql files..

Watching ChatGPTs Operator creating slides for you is definitely Sloth mode work.

The moment when you paste the real final book cover into the production file

This new one took a bit more research than usual. Coming to your inbox in a few days.

Podcast cover work has started ... it's coming closer.

Testing authoredup.com for LinkedIn posts. Since LI is not working so well anymore for real conversations. It becomes more just a top of the funnel place to drop some idea content and learning snacks. Then I can also move to schedule the posts.

So my first virtual marketing team session is over with everyone developing a 6,12,30 weeks strategy for their area and let the virtual CMO review it. The good part for me was that it forced me to think a lot about positioning and audiences.

I am experimenting this weekend with some specific role chats in ChatGPT forming a virtual marketing team. I am interested to find out how it can help with brainstorming and focus for my marketing efforts.

Do you record videos to explain dashboards? Lately I started to do this more consistently, to have a 3m explainer video describing the purpose of the dashboard and what each chart is showing.

As a proud Danish resident - I think, it is a great idea to purchase California from the US, so of course, I signed the petition: denmarkification.com and you can do it too!

Started recording my @metabase.com videos for my BI tools deep-dive series. First impressions: decent onboarding, got my first chart in 15min. The videos will be released next week!

Ok, I will start working on a longer post about separating data collection and analytics. This topic has now come up for the third time in a week.

From my latest blog post: Progress happens on an account and on a user level. I picked the Asana example of using workflows. This can happen on org level but also on a user level. Especially the user in comparison to the org shows the wide adoption level. https://buff.ly/42CrHFX

From my last blog post: Turn metrics into motivation! Build an "automation score" for Asana users based on their workflow usage. Instead of just measuring adoption, you could drive motivation to use more workflows for repetitive tasks Pure metrics → activation tool.

Day 2 of Tracking Plans: SLACK The big q: do you track secondary features like notifications? While some teams rely on notifications, Slack works fine without them. I chose to focus on core features first - better to nail the basics than track everything. My reasoning here:

Creating tracking plans for 20 startup tools in 4 weeks! Starting with Notion: - Video tutorial - Miro design - JSON Schema - Blog deep-dive Learn about active asset tracking, properties vs. activities & more Get all: https://buff.ly/4azAyKH #Analytics #ProductData

I think, I really don’t like greedy people - even the ones that are just a little bit like this.

I just published an introduction to BigFunctions (blog and video) - an open-source project that enables analysts to automate data workflows directly from SQL. Blog: timodechau.com/from-sql-to-... YouTube: youtu.be/aTXUBp_PyiI

One thing that I also want to build with more time is a really good open-source event data tracking pipeline. We lost a good one with Snowplow. And I think with today's tech, we can even build a simpler one.

If I ever have some time and energy to build a software product again - I think a SQL CTE debugger would be the thing. Find the spot where you are loosing and gaining rows and values in seconds

As a former product person, the data mesh people have really screwed up the data product term. So I need to find a new one: apps, tools, don't know yet.

This is fun to watch - when you have enjoyed any of Sid Meier's games - which I assume many of you did: www.youtube.com/watch?v=C12B... It sets me on the path today to figure out how to play Pirates on the Mac. Oh, I loved this game so much.

Is anyone using @evidence.dev as an embedded dashboard in a frontend app? I know that it can be an app by itself, but in this project, it needs to be embedded in an existing app.

Decisions, Tasks, Questions - I just published How I Work with Reconfigured - which became an essential item in my data workflows. timodechau.com/how-i-reconf...

The proper soundtrack when you run dbt init: open.spotify.com/track/59h6Uw...

Yesterday, I learned that someone bought my book and used Notebook ML to work with it. This tells me two things: - This person is really smart! - My book needs to become easier to navigate since it already has 528 pages (working on it)

Claude: "You've convinced me - this would be a better architecture!" - I am still good at convincing.

AstroJS update - the issue I was hunting for two days was a combination of Clerk middleware integration and dynamic routes. Found something that works now.

Young product me: the UX is not state of the art anymore, let’s do a redesign. Now product me: yeah, looks a bit old but drives perfectly, let’s dust it off a bit.

It's not so nice - I switched from AstroJS to NextJS. There is too much interaction going on and I was constantly running into hydration issues. Now I take the opportunity to rebuild everything from scratch in Next.