The request
From Daniel Foster, Mobile Product Manager
“Every report I see, the app's slice of orders is bigger than the year before. I want to go into planning saying the app is where our growth is, and ask for two more engineers. Can you pull the numbers that show it? Planning starts on the 20th.”
Your goal
Choose the version of the question you would agree with Daniel before touching the data.
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What Daniel gets, and why
The lesson
Why framing comes first
Daniel has a conclusion and wants numbers for it. That is normal: most requests arrive that way. Your first job is to turn it into a question the data could answer either way. SMART is the usual checklist:
- Specific: which orders and which channels. Here: completed orders through web, app and marketplace, 2023 to 2025.
- Measurable: each channel’s share of orders and of revenue, the order counts behind the shares, and the average order value (AOV) per channel.
- Achievable: every order carries its
channelandstatus, and every line its price, so shares, counts and revenue all come from the data. - Relevant: it feeds Daniel’s planning ask and, just as much, the website team’s.
- Time-bound: whole calendar years, an answer before planning on the 20th.
Share, count and value
A share is a channel’s orders divided by all orders in the same period. It answers “how is the pie divided?”, not “how big is the pie?”. Three things have to sit next to it:
- The counts. If the app’s share rises because web orders fall, the store has not grown; orders have moved. This is the difference between mix and growth.
- Revenue share. If app orders are smaller, the app’s share of revenue trails its share of orders, and a shift towards the app trims revenue.
- Like-for-like periods. Whole years compare cleanly. Single months bring in the holiday peak,
and the last days of 2025 still have orders marked
pending.
What the plan looks like
| Step | What you do | Output |
|---|---|---|
| Check | Count orders by channel and status, find the late pending ones | a 3-row table |
| Analyse | Share of completed orders and revenue, by year and channel | a 9-row table |
| Compare | Orders 2024 vs 2025, AOV and shipping fee by channel | a 3-row table |
| Recommend | What it means for planning, with caveats | three or four sentences |
Interview note
“Our mobile share went from 30% to 45%. Is that good news?” is a classic analyst interview prompt. The strong answer asks what happened to the total and to the other channels, whether mobile orders are worth as much, and whether the same customers simply switched device. A share on its own is never the answer.
Lantern lit!
Practised: smart goalproblem framingshare of totalmix vs growthdata completeness
- Solved
- No hints
- First run