Why teams can't see the value in better analytics (and what to do about it)
Original: TBM 19/52: The Analytics ROI Paradox
John Cutler
June 2, 2025
3 min read
Opinion
Intermediate
Summary
Methodologies for calculating and understanding the lifetime value of customers, including retention curves, discount rates, cohort LTV, and using LTV to evaluate the efficiency of customer acquisition.
Who This Is For
Product Managers
Marketing Managers
Founders
Key Takeaways
- Teams that can't measure their current impact struggle to see the value of improving their decision-making tools
- A 100-person team makes tens of thousands of decisions yearly - small improvements in decision quality compound dramatically
- Teams working in smaller batches with better tooling can produce roughly 2x better outcomes than those working in large batches
- Start persuading organizations by emphasizing the sheer volume of decisions made and potential for marginal gains
- Basic reflection practices like 'we expected X but Y happened' can significantly improve team performance
Tools & Technologies
Amplitude Analytics software (general)
Topics Covered
customer-lifetime-value retention-metrics business-models unit-economics
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