How to Explain Data Models to Business Managers

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Analysts often hear about how vital data is to business but are not aware of how to best explain the ideas from it. This is especially tricky when working with managers who get overwhelmed by data.

Well, the best way to get the message across to those managers is to plan the explanation. Doing so highlights how to best plan the explanations of a data model to your colleagues so that they link to their often-raised questions.

There are a lot of ways to write an explanation these days, from good ol’ Microsoft Word to more sophisticated documents like Markdown and other data science notebooks. What can be a good framework to start an explanation without too much extraneous detail?

There’s a saying that the answers are often never as important as the right question. So, the steps in planning a good explanation of data focuses on identifying those right questions the managers are thinking about most. The result will drive insightful discussions and organize subsequent tasks that have meaningful value to those managers.

Start framing the audience's needs as a question to be answered

An audience is the most obvious starting point, but the purpose of a data model is to address or describe an answer to a question being posed. So…