We recently went through a common process at Mode; we considered bringing on a new tool for our data infrastructure. While those of us on…

There's a fundamental change taking place in the way that organizations make decisions. For analysts and data scientists, the days of being…

Last week, I urged data science teams to focus on delivering value quickly and iteratively (thanks to Ian Blumenfeld for highlighting…

One of the most common reasons an organization reaches out to Mode is that they're about to begin investing in analytics, and they want our…

Analysts often assume that the best way to advance their careers or provide more value is to improve their technical chops. While it's true…

The World Chess Championship 2018, a match between reigning champion Magnus Carlsen and challenger Fabiano Caruana , just came to a…

When we talk to analytics teams about what they're working on and what big projects are coming up, this is a common refrain we hear: “Right…

In case you missed it, we launched a free product earlier this year, Mode Studio . Free products aren't common in the world of analytics…

Anytime you look for patterns in previous experiences, or make a tradeoff between one option and another, you're analyzing something. This…

A few weeks ago, Google announced a new feature, Dataset Search , that aims to make it easier for anyone to discover public datasets…

The internet is awash in Venn diagrams of SQL JOINs and explanations of why they're necessary. Though it would be nice if we could…

As analysts, we know that each question we ask of our data can be answered with multiple potential languages and toolkits. Each language has…

If your company is one of the thousands using Salesforce on a daily basis, their customer-relations management (CRM) tool is a treasure…

Any time you look for patterns in previous experiences or make a tradeoff between one option and another, you're working with analytical…

At Mode, we believe everyone is analytical. Any time you look for patterns in previous experiences, or make a tradeoff between one option…

At Mode, we believe everyone is analytical. Any time you look for patterns in previous experiences, or make a tradeoff between one option…

Before starting Mode, I was an analyst. It's embarrassing to admit, but at the time, I thought I had all the answers. I thought that being…

Some subtle, yet significant updates from the last quarter We are always looking for ways to improve Mode. Sometimes this means adding…

What makes an analytics team great? To find out, we interviewed the leaders of three: Maura Church , Senior Data Science Manager at…

Between the thousands of data scientists, analysts and others who use Mode every day, and the hundreds of companies that run their…

Since its introduction in 2007, ggplot2 has become one of the most frequently-downloaded and widely-used R packages in the world. Many…

For many of Mode's employees, this is their first job at an analytics company. Those team members often assume that Mode's internal…

Jasmine Tsai shares lessons from building and leading Clover Health’s data platform. Jasmine Tsai got her first taste of data engineering…

If you're an analyst, you probably already know and love the tools made by Plotly . Plotly lets analysts and developers create powerful…

If you've visited the CRAN repository of R packages lately, you might have noticed that the number of available packages has now topped a…

When Jake Klamka founded Insight Data Science in 2011, the term “data science” had a much different understanding in the private sector…

Among data scientists and analysts, R has long held its own against Python in the battle to determine the “best” analytical programming…

Four years ago, Mode set out to build the best data platform for every analyst in the world. Since then, we've seen more and more people…

Specialized tooling has proliferated the data engineering community. This trend is growing, and the data infrastructures of modern…

Computational notebooks for data science have exploded in popularity in recent years, and there's a growing consensus that the notebook…

As an academic discipline, data science is bigger than ever, and still growing. Inside Higher Ed recently reported that 303 new accredited…

As an analyst or data scientist, developing a deep understanding of multiple analytical programming languages can create an advantage in…

The collection and analysis of user data by software companies is key part of the product development process. User data is valuable to more…

Python's powerful data analysis capabilities are loved the world over . When it comes time to share findings with your team, taking a few…

It's time to add forecasting to your data team's tool kit. Mode notebooks now support Prophet , a powerful forecasting library for Python…

Usage data is like gold for software development teams. Software companies are constantly analyzing user behavior to create valuable insight…

Getting your first job in data science can be a full-time job all on its own. Simply finding a job post worth applying to can be a chaotic…

Analysts and data scientists with a deep understanding of multiple analytical programming languages find themselves at an advantage in…

So you've built a software product, and you have some users. You're generating data about how users interact with your product. You want to…

I don’t know about you, but sometimes getting a new report from an analyst feels to me like an exciting holiday morning—or like unboxing an…

As an analyst or data scientist, it’s becoming increasingly advantageous to have a deep understanding of multiple analytical programming…

Working at Mode, I get to talk with a lot of analysts and data scientists. These talks have led to a ton of insightful conversations about…

When we introduced White-Label Embeds about a year ago , our goal was to give people the ability to deliver data to their communities in a…

Eric Mayefsky, head of data science at Quora, has assessed hundreds of job candidates in his half decade in management at various tech…

We here at Mode Analytics have been Amazon Redshift users for about 4 years. Redshift enables and optimizes complex analytical SQL queries…

Just in time to make good on New Year's resolutions, today we're releasing a major upgrade to Mode's Python Notebooks: support for over 2…

In this day and age, every company needs an analytical decision-making culture. Every company needs to be data-driven. And not someday…

This year's annual AWS re:Invent conference was full of exciting product announcements. From long-awaited crowd-pleasers such as Elastic…

Customer success teams are a central pillar of recurring-revenue businesses. Great customer success teams help users get the highest…

Last year, we launched White-Label Embeds to provide a secure and seamless way to serve data to customers as a part of any application…

2017 feels like a turning point for the analytics community—everyone seems to be talking about the sudden proliferation of analytics tools…

A few months ago, Stack Overflow confirmed what many people have been predicting for years, and crowned Python king of the software jungle…

Amazon Redshift users got a nice surprise last month when AWS announced their new Dense Compute (DC2) nodes, providing up to twice the…

Mode is the only analytics platform with native support for Python Notebooks . For the last year and a half, Mode users have been rapidly…

Analysts turn to Mode as the toolkit of choice for their work: SQL and Python-powered data exploration, visualization, and advanced…

Connect Mode to Amazon Athena to explore data stored in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). An interactive query service that…

Hiring a data scientist can be a tricky process. The actual definition of “Data Scientist” is vague, the day-to-day job of someone with…

The applications of color theory in business are vast. One of the most useful applications of color theory is the visualization and…

Colors are key to understanding data visualizations. They represent your data and guide people through charts and dashboards, making them…

Earlier this week, we released visualization filters that allow everyone on Mode to interact more deeply with dashboards to find new…

Over the last few months, we've been heads down building new power into Mode to help everyone explore data. Earlier this summer we…

Pairing great data talent with great data jobs As an analyst, finding a great job can be tough. We're all too familiar with this here at…

For most companies, essential data starts its life in all sorts of silos. Many businesses are running on a growing range of SaaS platforms…

As it has in previous years , WrangleConf 2017 brought to the foreground some of the most pressing issues for data scientists today…

Phase II of this summer's code-free data exploration rollout is now live: drag-and-drop data exploration. There's a whole new world of…

A couple of weeks ago we announced a series of new code-free data exploration features to let everyone find answers hidden in data. The…

There's a common misconception that an analyst's work is lonely. That we're mad scientists off in a corner somewhere crunching numbers in…

Designing dashboards for display around the office introduces unique challenges for effectively communicating insights. The dashboards need…

Dashboards. They're the best way to keep every team focused on goals and provide critical context for your business as a whole. While not…

Analysts at companies of all sizes are pushing beyond ordinary dashboards and charts, using custom data visualizations to deliver high…

You might not have heard of Eko, but chances are you’ve interacted with their content. Eko has pioneered the medium of interactive video…

From streamgraphs to voronoi to polar clocks , there's essentially no limit to the types of data visualizations you can make with the…

Presenting data effectively is a critical part of communicating insights. Making reports look appealing or building interactive charts isn't…

Analysts know that having the right numbers is only half the battle. In order for your work to make an impact, it has to be presented in a…

The best analysts know that charts alone are not always enough to inform decisions. Even the most amazing chart of all time can be left open…

Our partner Stitch is introducing Singer : an open source project for simple, composable ETL. Singer enables any data source to be analyzed…

Mode's new SQL-powered pivot tables are designed to give everyone the ability to instantly explore shared data sets. But a pivot table is…

Today we're rolling out two new updates for Mode Python Notebooks, making Python analysis more efficient and accessible to everyone. With…

When trying to understand a data set, analysis often starts broad and narrows as you go. SQL is perfect for pulling the broad data set and…

Now that the Mode SQL editor supports running multiple SQL statements , you can do so much more than pull data back from the database. One…

Keeping work organized is hard. It's time consuming to ensure everything is in the right place and clearly labeled. Plus, if you're not sure…

Back in December, we brought customers 12 new features in 12 days , including the highly requested Mode Slack app . People are now sharing…

On December 20th, 2016, the day the Electoral College made Trump's presidency official, we sent this internal letter to the Mode team. Now…

Sometimes, your customers need a little nudge to engage more deeply with your product. This can happen for a whole host of reasons…

We just capped off 12 days of new features, but we couldn't resist adding one more before the holidays! As the year comes to a close and…

We launched Definitions back in September to help analysts save time writing queries and establish trusted business logic across projects…

Today we're releasing the #1 most requested SQL editor feature: support for multiple SQL statements in one query. Hello, temp tables…

Over the past 10 days we've added four powerful new ways to share analysis: Slack , email upgrades , external sharing , and White-Label…

The Mode Slack App is here! Now it's easier than ever to put timely, relevant data into the hands of decision makers, right when and where…

Email is still a mainstay for communication and sharing ideas, even if it feels like it's going the way of the dinosaur. Whether it's ad hoc…

Analysis isn’t just about finding the insights—it’s about delivering them to your coworkers. And often the biggest challenge is helping…

It's easy to get swept up in the latest design trend. Remember when everyone was into skeuomorphism ? Long shadows ? All caps cursive…

⌘-Z! ⌘-Z! We've all been there. Sometimes, ⌘-Z doesn't take you back far enough. And sometimes, it's not a matter of undoing—but comparing…

As your business grows, so too does the list of people outside your company who need to access to data and reporting. Financials for…

As consumers, we're increasingly accustomed to seeing data served back to us as features in the apps and products we use day in and day out…

Today, as part of our effort to deliver 12 highly requested “Wish List” features in 12 days, we're adding highlight to run to the SQL editor…

From highly-requested SQL editor upgrades, to tools to share analysis with everyone in your organization (and beyond), we're about to…

THUMBS UP EndorsementDB: Predicting the U.S. election without polls By now, we know there are pitfalls to relying on opinion polls to…

Last week, we examined HBO's original series Westworld with charts showing the relationships between characters , whom they mention…

For the past seven weeks, a corner of the internet has been obsessed with the HBO original series Westworld . Redditors have spent hours…

Clinton and Trump are two of the most unpopular presidential nominees in U.S. history. That made us wonder: Would we be better off if a…

FORTUNE TELLER Why I’m Teaching Twitch to Predict the Future Forecasting is a good habit to adopt in the workplace. It'll help you figure…

Sometimes the median and mean aren't enough to understand a dataset. Are most of the values clustered around the median? Or are they…

NOT THAT SIMPLE Don’t Become a Victim of One Key Metric " T he search for one key metric at all for a complex ecosystem like Pinterest over…

Timestamps are crucial to business analysis for a very simple reason: they tell you when things happen. Imagine trying to suss out trends in…

Regardless of the size or purpose of your company, customer service (or success or support) is a crucial part of your customer lifecycle…

OUTSIZED OUTLIER How One 19-Year-Old Illinois Man Is Distorting National Polling Averages This deep-dive into the methodology of an election…

Last month we launched our new Spaces feature to make it easier to organize reports around teams and projects. Analysts quickly found a…

According to data visualization expert Andy Kirk , there are two types of data visualizations: exploratory and explanatory. The aim of…

DOH! The Simpsons by the Data America's favorite family has been around for 27 years, providing plenty of data to analyze. Find out who's…

Anyone who has tried to learn SQL knows it's tricky to get the hang of joins . You're breezing through SELECT statements and comparison…

AND THE NOMINEES ARE... Kantar Information Is Beautiful Awards - Shortlist The shortlist for the Kantar Information Is Beautiful Awards has…

Problem Analytics are hard to get right – especially for complex business models (like API-first SaaS). Building a flexible analytics stack…

Where do you get your data science news? Twitter? Reddit? Social media is a great way to discover new articles, podcasts, and videos, but it…

ONE POLL, FOUR RESULTS We Gave Four Good Pollsters the Same Raw Data. They Had Four Different Results. Dig into the methodology of four…

As a demand generation marketer, I'm constantly searching for the right mix of ad platforms and publishers to bring in leads. But when each…

DROPPIN' BEATS Visualizing Hundreds of My Favorite Songs on Spotify A deep statistical dive into defining songs with attributes—such as…

Since the beginning, one of Mode's goals has been to make simple things easy and complex things possible. In the past year, we added on data…

Anybody who's ever tried writing code of any kind knows that style matters. Caps or no caps? CamelCase or use_underscores? Tabs or spaces…

From the start, Mode's goal has been to make data more accessible. When analysts and their business partners work together on one data…

ASK ME ANOTHER Asking good questions is hard (but worth it) Although this framework is written from a programmer's perspective, it's a great…

A trio of new features is launching today: Definitions, Spaces, and Access Controls are all designed to create a tight-knit data culture by…

PEDAL FORTH Is urban cycling worth the risk? We've all heard the horror stories about bicycle accidents on city streets. But if you take…

When analysts create reports for teams throughout their company, there are inevitable follow-up questions. Engagement is higher on mobile…

You've probably heard of the Pareto principle, even if you didn't realize it at the time. Here are a few examples: 80% of web traffic comes…

CATCH ME IF YOU CAN Usain Bolt and the Fastest Men in the World Since 1896 – on the Same Track We know, we know. The Olympics are over, but…

The real world is messy, and so too is its data. So messy, that a recent survey reported data scientists spend 60% of their time cleaning…

EASY AS 1, 2, 3? 3 Reasons Counting is the Hardest Thing in Data Science Counting isn't technically difficult; the real challenge lies in…

For folks hoping to make a career switch to data science, there are a ton of questions to tackle: Which languages should I learn? Which…

MUST-READ What I Wish I Knew About Data For Startups One entrepreneur reflects on his learnings from four years of working with data at a…

At the end of the day, a key job of any analytics team is to effectively communicate data and insights, with the goal of driving informed…

Today we're excited to announce Mode's new integration with DataVault from Tenjin , a company focused on providing marketers insight into…

ENGAGE! Star Trek Viz Explore this network visualization of the entire Star Trek universe (except for Star Trek: Beyond ). Filter by…

Source: Sam Charrington via Twitter For the second year in a row, WrangleConf did not disappoint. The conversation picked up right where…

Last October, our friends at RJMetrics introduced the beta version of their ETL service, RJMetrics Pipeline. Today, they've officially taken…

SPIN DOCTORS Our nine-point guide to spotting a dodgy statistic Numbers might appear unwavering and objective, but they're easily…

It all started with a tweet. And just like that—after stints at AOL, ThisLife, and Shutterfly—Romy Macasieb became the first product manager…

There are many of us—errr, people —who build stuff with Legos at all ages . Having grown up with loads of hand-me-down Legos (and having a…

Sometimes communicating data is as simple as sharing out a basic chart. Sometimes telling an impactful data story means creating a knock-out…

Today we're excited to announce Mode's integration with Heap , a powerful platform that enables you to build analytics infrastructure for…

Over the years, I've used a variety of languages and tools to analyze data. As I think back on my time using each tool, I've come to realize…

When writers hit a block, they read. When musicians get stuck, they seek stimulation by listening to music. It's the same with any craft…

As your business grows, maintaining excellent customer service requires delivering high-quality solutions efficiently and effectively. But…

No matter how you're looking to present your data, there's a seemingly endless number of Python libraries and resources to use (check out…

In our previous blog post , we covered some of the exploratory analysis we did for Highfive, a modern meeting room collaboration and video…

Sometimes you just need to share a data set. A list of app users who meet certain criteria. A call list for a sales team. You get the idea…

Scroll through the Python Package Index and you'll find libraries for practically every data visualization need—from GazeParser for eye…

Presenting new data always raises more questions than it answers. Your coworkers want to better understand results to inform decision-making…

Sourav Dey is a Partner at DataHoliks , a data-science consulting firm founded to help organizations apply data science without committing…

Since day one, Mode has been a product built by analysts, for analysts. As analysts, we're at our best when free to uncover unexpected…

Intronis CEO Rick Faulk argues that there are three key benefits of total transparency at your company: Employee trust and buy-in A more…

Despite the fact that retention is key for SaaS and mobile growth , there's very little consensus on the factors that indicate good…

Head over to the Report Builder to check out a few new features that will make it easier to present a data story beautifully. Rather than…

With the emergence of data integration tools it's easier than ever to get your hands on consolidated data from third-party tools. Access to…

Did Sheila get the answer she needed when she emailed our support team? Did Joe spend more in store this trip compared to last trip? Did…

Head over to Twitch on any given day and you'll find 250,000 broadcasters live streaming content to more than two million concurrent…

The Salesforce customer relationship management (CRM) tool is your sales organization's second brain. It's a memory bank filled with every…

Retention. It's the quiet force behind your product's growth . With bad retention, acquisition efforts fill a leaky bucket. Great retention…

We recently talked about ways to set your customers up to be successful, long-term users of your product . By identifying strong audiences…

If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? We're not entirely sure. What we do know is that if…

This is the first installment of our new “Ask the Analyst” series. We'll be interviewing analysts from various industries to get the inside…

Yesterday, we explored how brands use colors on Instagram . Today, we're looking at trends in Instagram's early-adopter photographer…

Starbucks green. UPS brown. Target red. Some of the most recognized brands have built their visual identity on just one color. They create…

Retention has long played second fiddle to user acquisition. It's easy to see why: getting new users is fun and can feel impressive (5,00…

Sometimes you just want to put two charts next to each other. Now you can. Today we're rolling out a new drag-and-drop report builder that…

If you use Excel at work, you're probably frustratingly familiar with this dialog box: You've probably also worked on a spreadsheet that was…

In 2015, people used Mode to answer thousands of questions. As we looked back on the year, we were curious about trends across companies…

When it comes to distributing analysis, it can be helpful to put data where folks discover it over the natural course of their day. For some…

Like the analysts who use Mode day-in and day-out to answer some of the hardest questions a business can throw at them, we hammer on our…

Anyone who's used Salesforce is familiar with its reporting dashboard. The deal pipeline, the closed deals speedometer, the reps' activities…

Which database is best? The question, obviously, depends on what you want to use it for. I, like most analysts, want to use a database to…

In October, we launched our new product, RJMetrics Pipeline . Pipeline integrates data from all the systems you use to run your business…

Nearly a year ago we wrote about the questions folks should consider when making early analytics hires . While those questions are helpful…

There’s a pretty cool marriage of tech and health going on right now. You can see it on the “about” page of so many of the Rock Health…

The moving average is the Swiss Army knife of metrics. It's adaptable, reliable, and simple to use. Stock traders know this better than…

Parsed UTM parameters mean squeaky clean campaign data for analysis. Check out our entire series of #datapointers here. -- Is email or…

On my first day at Mode, I was given a list of basic business questions to answer. How many SQL queries do our customers write each day? How…

There's an interesting discussion happening in the Silicon Valley data science community. Last week about 100 data scientists gathered for…

On Wednesday over 500 members of the data science community gathered at the Village in San Francisco for CrowdFlower’s Rich Data Summit…

In a world of ever expanding data streams , we rely on timestamps to organize data down to the millisecond. But this level of detail can be…

Understanding how your data is distributed is critical for any analysis. Box-and-whisker plots are great for summarizing distributions and…

Analyzing datasets that include email addresses can be a pain. But when armed with a few common operations, you can clean your data quickly…

An old baseball coach of mine used to say “that's a million-dollar catch and a ten-cent throw” (adapted from a famous Bull Durham quote…

Today we're announcing our $7.5 Million Series A, led by Foundation Capital . Steve Vassallo is joining our board of our directors and we…

Our friends over at Amplitude have a unique approach to event tracking and analytics for mobile apps. Like some analytics tools out there…

This post is outdated. For an easier way to add links to your query results, see this example . We look to share our work externally…

For people who analyze customer behavior, the table above is a familiar one. This Mixpanel chart measures retention rates across different…

Charts. We love them. And while we prefer actual pie to pie charts , we're excited to serve up a delicious new set of chart types a la Mode…

When we launched Mode's new SQL workflow earlier this year, we said there would be a lot to come on the charting front. Today the first…

An analyst's daily work can get repetitive. One day a request from a product manager can sound like: “Hi Derek, could you please pull the…

A lot of product questions are based on the idea of a user “session.” What do users do when they first log in? In what order do users take…

Asking questions is easy. It's so easy that, as askers, we often don't think about the quality of our questions. Poorly framed questions…

People often talk about a startup's evolution in terms of funding, sales , or product engagement milestones . But companies also change…

How we used data to help Watsi find sustainable strategies for funding worldwide healthcare. Our friends over at Segment recently came to…

Now you can use Mode to analyze data in Apache Hive, Cloudera Impala, Google BigQuery, and HP Vertica! As more teams get up and running…

CrowdFlower , the leading data enrichment platform, helps data scientists collect, clean, and label data. Their on-demand workforce tackles…

Mode recently released a big update to our collaborative analytics tool. The new features were informed by a careful combination of…

When we launched Mode's public beta in June 2014 , we knew we were putting an MVP (minimum viable product) editor into the wild. As soon as…

We're on a mission to build analysis software that works the way today's analysts work. And that means building tools an analyst can share…

Many leading tech companies have promoted “aha moments”—the instant a user understands the value of their product—as a key to growth. Most…

Over the course of a startup's lifetime, a company can face a range of data challenges. In the beginning, startup founders do most analysis…

Building a successful analytics team requires investment in everything from people and tools to infrastructure and event tracking. But the…

layout: mode title: "Meet Mode at DataWeek" author: "Emily Ritter" authortwitter: "emilyarden" authortitle: "Marketing at Mode" date: 201…

The world is full of interesting datasets . But even though data is increasingly accessible, it's sometimes hard think up an interesting…

Several years ago, I made the jump from being an Washington, D.C. policy analyst to a data analyst at a San Francisco tech company. Prior to…

The world is producing fascinating data at an unprecedented pace, on subjects ranging from air quality in Chicago, to the economics of…