Great analytics is defense, not fireworks

The unsexy rituals that actually change a company’s trajectory

When people think about analytics, they picture the aha moment.

The killer insight.

The thing that changes the trajectory.

But in my experience, 95% of analytics isn’t about breakthroughs. It’s about defense.

I first learned this from Ray Ko back when he was advising us at Intercom. Ray came out of Facebook’s growth team, and he had a philosophy that he drilled into us: growth isn’t about offense. It’s about playing great defense.

The slowdown that taught the lesson

Ray once told me about a morning at Facebook when new user growth suddenly cratered. Active users flatlined, and nobody knew why.

So they went into full investigation mode. Was it a specific country? A channel that had dried up? A change in the funnel? They chased down every angle.

Eventually they discovered something almost embarrassingly simple: the confirmation emails weren’t being delivered. A few major providers had started throttling them, so tens of thousands of people who had signed up couldn’t confirm their accounts.

Fixing the deliverability issue got growth back on track. But the real lesson was bigger. That slowdown forced the team to realize just how critical email confirmation was to Facebook’s growth.

The most important part: nobody would have thought of this as a growth lever. No PM was pounding the table saying, “The future of growth is email deliverability!” They were dreaming about sexy new features, viral loops, all the glamorous stuff. Meanwhile, email deliverability turned out to be one of the biggest levers they had.

That’s what made it so powerful. A slowdown turned defense into offense.

What it looked like at Intercom

At Intercom, we had dashboards for everything. The problem was, no one looked at them. So six months in, I built something simple we called The Daily Pulse.

Every day at 5 pm, an email went out to the entire company with a handful of charts—installs, trials, cancellations, page views. Nothing fancy.

The magic wasn’t in the charts. It was in what happened next. The CEO or a function head would reply-all if something looked off. Suddenly, we were all investigating. Why did trials dip today? Was it because of the Product Hunt launch? Did we break an onboarding flow? Did an ad campaign stop running?

That rhythm forced us to dig in every single day. And just like at Facebook, those investigations often turned slowdowns into opportunities. We learned which campaigns actually worked. We caught instrumentation errors before they derailed a whole week. We spotted when small product changes had outsized impact.

The Daily Pulse wasn’t just defense, it became offense. It helped us make faster decisions and gave us conviction about where to lean in.

A framework for playing defense

Here’s the simple playbook Ray instilled in me and what I carried into Intercom:

1. Push a daily pulse. Pick a handful of metrics that define the heartbeat of your business. Send them to everyone. Every day. No dashboards, no logins… push it to their inbox.

2. Set up real alerting. When something falls outside the normal band, trigger an alert. Don’t wait until the end of the month to realize something broke.

3. Run a fast Friday. End each week with a cross-functional review of the data. Talk about what changed, what broke, and what needs fixing.

4. Build an on-call muscle. Even at small scale, rotate responsibility for investigating anomalies. It builds distributed knowledge and accountability.

5. Treat slowdowns as classrooms. Don’t patch over them with a shiny new idea. Diagnose, fix, and then ask: how can this become offense?

The quiet work that wins

The things that really changed the trajectory at Intercom weren’t the fireworks. They were the boring-sounding rituals—daily pulses, quick alerts, fast Friday meetings.

That’s what Ray taught me: great analytics isn’t about chasing insights. It’s about defense. And if you get the defense right, the offense will take care of itself.