Today, we're announcing the newly-designed Mode developer site. The new site contains extensive documentation of commonly used API endpoints, plus a few new ones. We've also added an API cookbook give you templates for common tasks. These new resources make it easier than ever before to build with Mode.

As analysts and data scientists, we have to make our work compelling and persuasive to change the way our organizations think. It can be easy to assume that our well-constructed graphs and tables are plenty convincing on their own. But this ignores a fundamental fact of analytics: it's still a human making the decision behind those numbers, and that person is rarely as quantitatively inclined as we are. Persuading this audience takes a skill that isn't discussed enough in the data science community: empathy.

A hands-off approach would seem reckless for questions about things like security. And yet that approach is not just the norm for analytical questions in most organizations; it's often the ideal. Many analytics teams aspire to enable as much “self-serve” as possible - in other words, to remove themselves from as many decision-making processes as they can.

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 advice. No matter how old they are, they all want to transition from being a company that has data to a company that truly uses their data.

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 that you need a baseline of technical skills to conduct analysis, most of us need further development of our soft skills rather than further honing of our hard skills.

Any time you look for patterns in previous experiences or make a tradeoff between one option and another, you're working with analytical skills. Improving these skills is one of the best investments you can make; you can tackle your own problems at work and get closer to answers for your own questions.