Story

I’ve been working in analytics and advanced analytics for about 6 years. I started in a large consultancy and later went solo, so I’ve seen both enterprise and smaller product teams up close.

Something keeps bothering me. In most projects, analytics feels like infrastructure that no one is genuinely excited about. People rarely want to invest in it when building a product. It’s treated as something you should have, not something you want to have.

Teams are “happy” to pay for software development, advertising, copywriting, design. Those are seen as directly useful. Analytics (GA4, event tracking, or even more structured setups like CDPs) is often perceived as background noise, necessary to keep the engine running, but not something that meaningfully moves the product forward day to day.

In practice, many teams end up using only a handful of metrics to make decisions, even when a complex analytics stack exists underneath. The rest is there “just in case.”

I’m curious whether others see the same pattern. Is analytics undervalued because its ROI is indirect and delayed? Or is most analytics work simply over-engineered for the actual decisions teams make? At what point does analytics shift from “necessary plumbing” to a real competitive advantage?

Would love to hear perspectives from founders, engineers, and product folks who’ve built and scaled things.