Finding value in your own data: pricing, customers, and assortment — episode two materials (Category #Data)

I've collected the materials from episode two of “Where’s the Profit in Data, Lebowski?” The episode was released on September 30, 2026: Andrey Tsybin, Nikolay Golov, and I discussed generating value from data inside a company.

In our first conversation, we explored selling data externally. Now we look at information already held in CRM, ERP, accounting systems, and spreadsheets: it can help us revisit prices, understand customer profitability, or change the assortment. Once the calculations are done, someone still has to change how they work — and figure out whether that helped the business.

We discussed: 1️⃣ Pricing The Motor City Industrial story helped us examine what happens when branches set prices independently, and how bringing sales and pricing data together supports an agreed approach. 2️⃣ Customers High revenue can hide high costs for support, returns, and employee time. A customer's loss-making status alone is no reason to drop them, though: relationships between products and network effects also matter. 3️⃣ Assortment An item with little profit on its own may bring people in to buy the rest of their basket. Storage, delivery, joint purchases, and substitutes therefore enter the calculation too. 4️⃣ A one-off project and an ongoing process Nikolay advocates starting with a bounded task using available data. I return to the rules that will remain after the project: prices and products will keep changing, and people will keep making decisions. 5️⃣ Assessing the effect Andrey asks an awkward question: if the business made more money after a change, was that definitely because of the change? We discussed observing shoppers, experiments, and the distinction between correlation and causation.

The cases came from public vendor and consulting materials. They help explain the mechanism but do not disclose all implementation costs; our estimates in the conversation should not be treated as a ready-made budget.

Episode materials: 📌 Episode page with timestamps 🎬 YouTube, VK Video 🎧 Podster, Yandex Music, Apple Podcasts 📝 7-minute recap

Where does work with data usually get stuck for you: in the calculations, in changing the process, or in checking the result?

#Data #Product #Analytics #Management #Metrics