Stop 13 · Business Communication & StorytellingTopics · 6/7

Writing a Technical Report

In short

Six months from now, someone (maybe you) will ask 'why did we pick this model?'. A good technical report answers that without a meeting and lets another data scientist repeat your work.

Documenting your methodology, assumptions, and results clearly enough that another data scientist could reproduce (or challenge) your work — a habit that builds both rigor and trust.

The mascot writes in a thick recipe notebook next to a steaming biryani pot and bowls of spices.

Think of it like this

Nani's recipe notebook

Nani's biryani is lost unless someone writes it down: which rice, how much masala, how long on dum, and what went wrong the time it burnt. A technical report is that notebook for your analysis, detailed enough that someone else gets the same result.

Watch it happen

The shape of a good report

Technical report

Summary

Data & setup

Method

Baseline

Final model

Results & limits

1/4Summary first: problem, result and recommendation in one paragraph. Many readers stop here.

The big ideas

What you need to know

Summary on top

Busy readers read one paragraph. Make it hold the problem, the answer and the recommendation.

Pin down the data

Write table names, date ranges, filters and row counts. 'Recent data' means nothing in six months.

Always show a baseline

A score is only meaningful next to a simple alternative, like predicting the average.

Write the limitations

Listing what could go wrong builds more trust than pretending nothing can.

See it in code

Walk through the code

text

1# 30-day churn model: technical report (v1, 2026-07-15)2 3## 1. Summary4One paragraph: problem, best model, headline result, recommendation.5 6## 2. Data7Source tables, date range, row counts, filters, label definition.8 9## 3. Method10Baseline, features, models tried, validation scheme, random seed.11 12## 4. Results13Test metrics vs baseline, error analysis by segment, key charts.14 15## 5. Limitations and next steps16Known gaps, assumptions, risks, what you would try next.

1/4The summary is for the manager who reads only this bit.

A skeleton you can paste into Google Docs or a README. Fill each section in a few lines, not pages.

Save yourself the pain

Common mistakes

Oops

Writing the report in the order you did the work, with the answer on page six.

Do this instead

Put the conclusion first. Then explain how you got there for readers who want detail.

Oops

Leaving out the approaches that didn't work.

Do this instead

List them briefly with the reason. It saves the next person from repeating your dead ends.

Your mission

Report one project

~40 min

Quick check

Which detail most helps another data scientist reproduce your result?

Go deeper

1Write a full technical report for one of your Phase 14 portfolio projects.
2Include sections for problem, data, methodology, results, and limitations explicitly.
3Get feedback from someone technical on whether your methodology is reproducible from the write-up alone.