Stop 11 · Business Acumen & Domain KnowledgeTopics · 8/8

Domain-Specific Analytics (Marketing, Product, Finance, Ops)

In short

SQL is the same everywhere, but the questions are not. Knowing which metrics each team lives by helps you sound useful from your first meeting with them.

Each business function has its own key metrics and mental models — marketing cares about CAC and channel attribution, product cares about activation and retention, finance cares about margin and cash flow.

The jaadu holds an open round spice box over four pots bubbling on a stove.

Think of it like this

One masala dabba, four dishes

The same steel spice box makes dal, sabzi, biryani and chai. What changes is which spices you pick and how much. Analytics is similar: the same SQL and charts, but marketing, product, finance and ops each need a different mix.

Watch it happen

Same skills, different questions

Analytics

Marketing

Product

Finance

Ops

CAC, ROAS

Retention

Margin, cash

SLA, delays

1/5Your core toolkit stays the same: SQL, spreadsheets, a BI tool and clear writing.

The big ideas

What you need to know

Marketing: where customers come from

Channel performance, campaign ROAS, attribution and funnel conversion. Expect lots of UTM and ad platform data.

Product: what users do

Event data, funnels, cohorts, A/B tests. The big question is whether users stick around.

Finance: does it add up

Revenue, costs, margins, budgets vs actuals. Accuracy to the rupee matters more than speed here.

Ops: is it running smoothly

Delivery times, inventory, staffing and SLAs. Often near real-time and very hands-on.

How it works

Picking up a new domain fast

1
Read their goals
Find the team's quarterly goals or OKRs. Those tell you which metrics they care about.
2
Learn the vocabulary
Write down every unfamiliar term from their meetings and look up each one.
3
Find their key tables
Ask which tables and dashboards they already trust.
4
Answer one small question
Deliver one quick, useful answer to build trust before bigger projects.

Save yourself the pain

Common mistakes

Oops

Using product-style metrics like DAU when the finance team asked about revenue per region.

Do this instead

Learn each team's vocabulary and answer in their metrics, not yours.

Oops

Trying to be an expert in all four domains at once.

Do this instead

Go deep in one domain for your first role, while knowing the basics of the others.

Your mission

One app, four questions

~20 min

Quick check

"Our 7-day retention dropped for users who signed up in September." Which team would care most?

Go deeper

1Pick one domain and learn its top 5 metrics in depth.
2Read a domain-specific analytics case study or blog post.
3Consider which domain's problems you'd genuinely enjoy working on daily.