Presenting new data always raises more questions than it answers. Your coworkers want to better understand results to inform decision-making. Business teams have insatiable appetites for slices of data—a sales team wants the numbers segmented by account age, while a product manager wants them grouped by product type.

In 2015, people used Mode to answer thousands of questions. As we looked back on the year, we were curious about trends across companies. Despite folks from a wide variety of business types—SaaS and retail and healthcare and myriad others—using Mode to make data more accessible, we wondered if there were common themes. How did people use data to improve their businesses?

For people who analyze customer behavior, the table above is a familiar one. This Mixpanel chart measures retention rates across different user cohorts. By moving down the table, you can see how retention is changing over time.