The request
From Daniel Foster, Mobile Product Manager
“OK, this is more interesting than the chart I had. Megan from Sales will be in the planning meeting too, and the website sits with her team. Give me the paragraph I can read out that's fair to both of us.”
Your goal
Read the chart, then choose the paragraph you would send Daniel.
Completed orders: 2,881 in 2023, 3,673 in 2024, 4,295 in 2025. App 742 → 1,239 → 1,904; web 1,715 → 1,891 → 1,761; marketplace 424 → 543 → 630. AOV 2025: app $523.27, web $557.03.
Show the numbers
| Year | app | marketplace | web |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2023 | 25.8% | 14.7% | 59.5% |
| 2024 | 33.7% | 14.8% | 51.5% |
| 2025 | 44.3% | 14.7% | 41% |
This case unlocks when you finish any one of:
The ticket and lesson are open to read now. Solve every level in one of those chapters, in whichever track you prefer, and this case opens.
What Daniel gets, and why
The lesson
From numbers to a recommendation
Two people will hear this paragraph, and they want different things from it. The structure that keeps it fair is what, how much, so what:
- What is the main finding? The app passed the website in 2025, partly by growing the business and partly by taking orders the website used to get.
- How much supports it? Shares: 44.3% of completed orders for the app, 41.0% for web. Counts: app orders up 53.7% on 2024 while the store grew 16.9% and web fell 6.9%. Value: $523 per app order against $557 on the web.
- So what does it mean for planning? Invest in the app because customers are moving there, and keep the website funded because it still earns about as much.
Caveats belong in the paragraph
- Who switched. Totals show web falling and app rising; they do not show that the same people moved. A customer-level check, how many 2024 web buyers ordered through the app in 2025, would.
- Pending orders. 92 orders from the last days of 2025 are still pending. Counting all of them as completed would leave the app’s share at 44.3%, so the finding holds; say it anyway.
- What the data does not hold. The marketplace charges Harbor & Pine a commission that is not in the tables, so its share of orders says nothing about what it earns.
The traps in the other options
- Share points read as growth. A share rising from 25.8% to 44.3% is 18.5 percentage points of the pie, not 18.5% more orders. The pie grew too, and web’s slice shrank.
- Extrapolating one year. One year of web decline is not a trend line to zero, and the website still brought 42.6% of 2025 revenue.
- Cause from two numbers. A steady marketplace share and a higher shipping fee do not show that customers dislike the channel.
The report structure behind this paragraph
In a written report this paragraph is the executive summary. Below it come the objective (the SMART question from the first level), the data and its limits (statuses, pending orders, no commission data), the method (shares by year with the counts behind them), the findings with the stacked chart, the recommendation and the next step: the customer-level check of who moved.
Lantern lit!
Practised: recommendationcaveatsmix vs growthextrapolationdata storytelling
- Solved
- No hints
- First run