Kidlin's law

If you work in analytics, data or are a data consumer in any way (yes, that includes asking questions to analysts) you need to be familiar with Kidlin's law.

Kidlin's law - "If you write the problem down clearly, then the matter is half solved."

Analytics is the side of the business where everything has been reduced to data points while the business questions we're trying to answer are usually "big", "opaque" or "vague".

Writing down these questions clearly forces you to specify different pieces of the problem and refine them. As a result, it helps everyone to understand which assumptions, hypotheses and data points are required to compose an answer to the questions.

I only recently learned about Kidlin's law even though we've been adopting something similar called "user stories" at Human37 since day 1.