How to Settle your Analytics Debt
Tags: analytics, datascience, management, leadership
Published: 2020-10-06 14:02:34

We've learned that companies go through these analytics maturity levels on their product journey:

1. **No data.** “Let’s just get our product to work and find someone to try it.”
2. **Any data better than no data.** “Whoops, we shipped without a way to know how it went. Can we add some tracking and release the app again? Maybe track this button and this button.” Data is an afterthought and a free-for-all.
3. **Data debt: Bad data worse than no data.** “I don’t trust this data. Do I use the 'Game Started' event or the 'Start Game' event? Or both?” Bad data has started confusing teams and risking detrimental product decisions.
4. **Fix it and govern it.** “We need to do something to stop making bad decisions based on misleading data; we’re breaking a chart in every feature release!” Teams start building workflows and home made tools to automate QA and maintain a single source of truth tracking plan.

Analytics debt becomes a pain when you start feeling that product market fit and your team starts scaling. When your product is available to users across platforms, and the tracking isn’t consistent across all of them. When more product managers join, that “any data is better than no data” starts becoming a growth blocker. People will make wrong decisions based on misleading data. Onboarding new developers becomes difficult. That “let’s just add this quick line of code to track this user action” is very easy to accidentally refactor out. Existing tracking breaks in every feature release, and it’s difficult for new developers know where to start when adding analytics for feature releases.

Analytics Debt is when you have incomplete, inconsistent, and bad data, and the only way to make data-driven decisions is to add more bad tracking because fixing what you have feels impossible.

At Avo, we’re here to help.

##The Avo Inspector helps you:##
**_Inspect_ your current state of tracking:** 

Install the Inspector SDK for all your platforms, to start logging event names, shapes, types, volumes, etc. and get all current tracking in a single source of truth.

**_Analyze_ tracking issues:** 

The Inspector dashboard will summarize your current state of tracking and highlight current issues such as volume discrepancies between platforms and missing properties.

**_Prioritize_ what to fix:** 

You know your tracking is a mess, but where to start fixing it? Use the Inspector dashboard Filters to share direct issue links to colleagues. Make your tracking issues are something you can reason about.

**_Fix_ important tracking:**

Define what events should look like. Build your tracking plan in using the Avo Event Library and Property Libraries to prevent inconsistencies that happen when data is designed manually in a spreadsheet

**_Future-proof_ your analytics:**

Avo is the state of the art for planning and implementing analytics, so you can ship faster without compromising data quality.

* Collaboration: A GitHub-like branched workflow for Product, Engineering and Data to work together on multiple features at the same time. 

* Reliability: Type safe analytics code to implement faster without compromising data quality. 

* Transparency: Single source of truth tracking plan to empower the team to always know which events they can use to answer their questions.

* Relevance: Unblock everyone to suggest data according to team guidelines. 
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##Avo Inspector Issue Reporter##

‍![Alt Text](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/i/rhb8rytwxt5bfvoz085s.png)

The Avo Inspector helps Product teams understand their current state of tracking so they can make good decisions, Engineering teams ship faster without compromising data quality, and Analytics teams support their product teams in maintaining clean data.

So you can get back to making data-driven decisions.

[Sign up for a demo](https://www.avo.app/request-a-demo?utm_source=devto&utm_medium=contentaggs&utm_campaign=settle_your_analytics_debt) to see how Inspector can work for your team.