Experiencing Data w/ Brian T. O’Neill

Brian T. O’Neill from Designing for Analytics
  • 4.9 (43)
  • Technology
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Does the value of your insights, analytics, or automated intelligence product sometimes feel invisible to buyers and users? Does your product have impressive analytics and AI technology, but user adoption and sales still are not where you want them to be? While it has never been easier to build data-driven products, why does it still seem so hard to build indispensable data products that users can't live without—and will gladly pay for? I’m Brian T. O’Neill, and on Experiencing Data — a Listen Notes top 2% global podcast — I help founders and B2B software product leaders close the Invisible Intelligence Gap through solo episodes and interviews with leaders at the intersection of product management, UX design, analytics, and AI. If you’re building analytics, BI, or automated intelligence (AI) products, this non-technical show will help you better connect your product to outcomes, value, and the human factors that still matter — even in the age of AI. Subscribe today on all major platforms or browse the episode archive. Get 1-Page Episode Summaries In your Inbox: https://designingforanalytics.com/ed About Brian: https://designingforanalytics.com/bio/

  1. 2d ago

    199 - Why Your Analytical AI Product Might Need 2 Pitches, Not 1, with Bhaskar Sunkara, CEO (bicycle.ai)

    I’m talking to Bhaskar Sunkara, CEO of bicycle.AI, which provides an AI analyst product designed to monitor revenue-critical KPIs, investigate the business and technical drivers behind KPI changes, and take a “governed next step.” Bhaskar explains why analytics products often fail when they overwhelm users with telemetry instead of focusing on the signals that matter. Drawing from his experience as founding CTO of AppDynamics, he shares how his team moved from low-level technical monitoring to business transactions like logins, checkouts, and bookings. The key lesson? Start with the right metric at the right level of granularity, then use deeper technical analysis to explain why something changed.   Bhaskar also breaks down how bicycle.AI serves multiple audiences inside an enterprise. Business leaders want measurable outcomes, KPI owners need answers about what changed and what to do next, and data teams require trust, governance, and traceability. He explains how, in order to support these different users, Bicycle separates product experience into four core surfaces: pull features like dashboards and chat, and push features like alerts and data stories. Alerts further help operational users respond quickly to KPI changes and data stories provide executives with strategic narratives around trends, causes, and business impact. During our chat, Bhaskar also draws a line most AI products blur: be explicit about which findings are deterministic and which are only a theory. He connects this directly to my CED framework, separating the conclusion from the evidence from the underlying data, and argues that how much you automate should be governed by one question: how costly is being wrong?   I also probed Bhaskar about their moat. He’s learned that enterprise adoption requires winning over both executives who care about revenue impact and analytics teams that need confidence in the system’s recommendations. Bhaskar also explains why their long-term advantage comes from the DEAL framework: Detect, Explain, Act, and Learn. By continuously incorporating validated decisions, business context, and customer-specific knowledge, the platform becomes more useful over time. We finish up with his advice for fellow analytical AI product founders, including why AI makes user experience more important, not less: it is the connection between agents, decisions, humans, and accountability.   Highlights / Skip to: Making the invisible feel urgent enough for customers to buy products (2:41) How to avoid creating the ‘metrics toilet’ when the system can do so much (6:56) Designing for the end-user versus the buyer, especially during the POC phase (12:20) Thinking about the product’s design in a way that ensures Bicycle’s business value is obvious (15:38) How bicycle.AI’s “push” and “pull” features help stakeholders see value (20:54) Getting their first 20 customers (25:19) What Bhaskar got wrong: over-rotating on the business buyer vs. the analytics team (32:23) The homework a build-anything horizontal platform imposes on customers (and Bicycle’s vertical antidote) (34:30) Bicycle.AI’s moat: compounding institutional knowledge (36:08) DEAL: Detect, Explain, Act, and Learn (40:46) How they designed the UX to reduce time-to-value during onboarding/setup (44:51) Bhaskar Sunkara’s advice for other analytical AI founders (and why AI makes UX even more important to address) (47:47) Links bicycle.ai  Bhaskar Sunkara’s LinkedIn  My CED framework for advanced analytics products that Bhaskar references in this episode

  2. Jul 7

    198 - Ship the Meter: Making Invisible AI Legible to Buyers with Rana Gujral

    Today, I'm talking to Rana Gujral, CEO of Behavioral Signals, which provides AI that interprets human behavioral cues in speech to help route call center conversations more effectively, improve customer service performance, and detect voice-based fraud. Their moat is a decade of voice data tied to real business outcomes, not the model itself, as Rana explains.   During our conversation, Rana shares his practical framework for making the value of their AI obvious to the various humans in the loop that the product needs to “touch,” and he argues that a one size [UI] doesn’t fit all. In Rana’s product, they discovered that customer service reps need ambient assistance, supervisors need aggregate patterns, compliance teams need audit trails, and executives need outcome metrics tied to business results.   He also explains why having measurable ROI isn't enough. Early renewals for Behavioral Signals suffered because the people signing the checks couldn't actually see the product's impact. Rana's solution? “Ship the meter” alongside the intelligence. If your AI works quietly in the background, you still need reporting UIs that clearly communicate the product’s value.   For founders struggling with stalled POCs, Rana breaks down the three-stage evaluation journey his team developed after repeatedly seeing deals fail at predictable moments. By designing the customer experience around those milestones, his team transformed how buyers gained confidence throughout the evaluation process.   Finally, we explored why great B2B AI products don't succeed by becoming another dashboard. Rather, they succeed by closing the loop between decisions, outcomes, and learning. Rana also fills me in on his upcoming book, The AI Instinct, which focuses on how AI changes human judgment rather than simply advancing model capabilities. And his parting advice? Listen to find out!   Highlights / Skip to: Making “invisible AI” value clear (3:57) The four surfaces of visibility the product team dials into to ensure Behavioral Signals is indispensable to customers(6:26) Behavioral Signals’ intentionality behind their three-phase model to address deals not closing (15:35) How Rana’s team deals with AI moving downstream problems further upstream (19:56) Determining their product’s boundaries: when do you stop building? (22:55) Why proprietary data makes for such a good moat (24:57) What Rana would do the same and differently if he were starting over (28:45) Rana’s book: The AI Instinct: The Future of AI and Human Decision-Making (39:29) Rana Gujral’s closing advice (44:35) Links Behavioral Signals  The AI Instinct: The Future of AI and Human Decision-Making  Rana Gujral’s website   Rana Gujral’s LinkedIn

  3. Jun 24

    197 - Agentic AI Isn’t a Moat for Analytics Products. This is

    Everyone is racing to the same place chasing a limited set of buyers—how will your “AI for BI” product stand out? I've been seeing teams heavily invest in copilots, agents, semantic layers, governance frameworks, and increasingly sophisticated models, yet many still hear the same feedback from sales prospects: “We may just build this ourselves?" Or they don’t hear it, but suspect the customer is doing just that.  Whether they actually can DIY the solution is the wrong question. The bigger question is *why they believe they can.* Your product may have a genuine competitive advantage, but your real challenge is that this advantage isn't obvious to buyers. The moat exists, but it is invisible. What makes this relevant is that many capabilities once considered differentiators are rapidly becoming normalized. AI copilots, agentic analytics, governed data, semantic layers, and broad integrations now appear across nearly every platform in the category. As AI accelerates development, sophisticated engineering alone becomes harder to defend as a lasting advantage. So what actually creates a durable moat if the engineering and product seems easy to copy? I explore four areas: proprietary data, trusted relationships, and products that accumulate institutional knowledge remain difficult to replicate. And finally, user experience itself as a strategy. As users increasingly access your intelligence through AI agents rather than dashboards, their experience may become the moat that competitors can't copy. Highlights / Skip to: AI for BI and analytics products is facing a race to commoditization (2:09) Common moats that everyone is using right now and why they fail (3:28) Proprietary data as a moat (9:29) Being embedded in your community as a moat (11:14) Compounding institutional knowledge as a moat (15:22) UX design asa moat even when there is little/no UI to see (18:36) Find the baseline for customer experience to build into later strategies (25:11) Actionable questions to ask your team to move forward on finding your competitive differentiation as a B2B analytics product (28:02)   Links CED: A UX Framework for Designing Analytics Tools That Drive Decision Making

  4. Jun 10

    196 - The Unique Challenges and Solutions to Selling API-based Analytics and Intelligence Products

    I've been seeing a recurring pattern with companies selling APIs, MCPs, data feeds, and other developer-focused AI products. While the technology is often sound if not impressive, sales momentum sometimes slows when prospects have to imagine how the product will create value in their own environment. My perspective on this is that the flexibility that makes these tools powerful can also make them harder to evaluate. Flexibility can adversely increase the Invisible Intelligence Gap, and I think certain types of AI-based solutions (LLM) may actually increase this because the boundaries of the product are often so much wider than ever before (if not invisible to the buyer). So, how to close this gap? Well, one way is to build a visual UI that showcases what’s possible with your API/feed/data solution. You take the buyer out of the conceptual space and make things concrete. So today, that’s what we dig into: when to consider adding a UI, how far you need to go with it, how you can use Copilot/AI agents to help customize these example implementations, and the benefits you might see.  Highlights / Skip to: The challenges of selling API-based analytics and AI products (0:56)  Why this topic matters right now (2:48) The Invisible Intelligence Gap that may be slowing your sales (3:34) Strategies for bridging the Invisible Intelligence Gap with a UI (user interface) layer (7:01) Client case study: the impact and results you may see adding a UI on top of your technical product (14:05) Signs that you should consider adding UI to your technical product (18:23) Leveraging humans’ highly developed visual system to help potential customers see the full value of your product (26:24) Conclusion (27:32) Links Invisible Intelligence Gap Azeem Azhar’s Exponential View (6/4/26 episode)

  5. May 26

    195 - Buyers Block: Why Your B2B Analytics or AI Product's POC Didn't Close

    It’s a common pattern for teams building B2B analytics and AI products: the proof-of-concept goes well, the buyers sound excited, and everyone assumes the deal is about to close—until it quietly stalls out. The assumption is usually that sales needs to follow up harder or marketing needs more enablement material. But often, the real issue is that the product itself cannot communicate its value without humans in the room explaining it. I call this the Invisible Intelligence Gap. Buyers may understand the promise during a guided demo, but once the sales engineers leave, customers are left trying to figure out workflows, use cases, trust concerns, integrations, and organizational fit on their own. This gets even harder with broad, general-purpose AI tools and chat-based interfaces that sometimes assume users already know what to ask. The solution isn’t simply shipping more features or training content. It’s designing products that clearly reveal their value, reduce customer effort, and continue selling themselves after the POC ends, and getting that design right starts with the right product strategy.    Highlights/ Skip to: First principles thinking - add sales effort or fix the product? (0:43) How the POC phase supports sales efforts (3:28) The role of the Invisible Intelligence Gap (5:38) What is “buyer’s block” and how to avoid it (6:26) Avoiding the “Two-Costs Model” and what that model is! (11:34) Overcoming a stalled sales process (13:42) Understanding the problem, users, outcomes, and boundaries (14:41) Three product strategy moves you can make (17:50) Always ask how customers are experiencing the product and if it sells itself (24:04) Links Podcast: Ep. 189 The Invisible Intelligence Gap

  6. May 12

    194 - AI for BI: Juan Sequeda on Preparing Your Analytics to Work With LLMs

    If you’re hoping that adding AI to your analytics product or capabilities is going to unlock new revenue, sales, and greater user adoption, but you’re not sure what’s involved in this transformation, this episode is for you! Today, I’m talking with Juan Sequeda today, an expert in knowledge graphs and ontologies who most recently was Head of the AI lab at data.world, which was recently acquired by ServiceNow. Juan and I met while speaking at CDOIQ a few years ago, and after being on his former podcast “Catalogs and Cocktails.” (With a name like that, I naturally had him out to my local tiki bar while visiting Cambridge!) Talk-to-your-data products – effectively next-gen business intelligence applications – are a hot topic right now, and this has made much of Juan’s PhD work in semantics highly relevant right now as companies try to make analytics more user-friendly via natural language.  Juan is clear that the starting point for this transformation isn’t the model or the UI, but actually the customer’s workflow—and that was like music to my ears! Analytics only matters when it drives action, so the real challenge is not answering more questions, but enabling better decisions and outcomes. A key theme is semantics, which, in product design language, I think of as making users’ mental models of their business or domain map logically to system and data models so that AI produces the right answers in the right context. Juan outlines a practical path to getting started with this: strong data modeling, a well-defined semantic layer, buy-vs-build considerations, and throughout, a constant focus on what the customer’s workflow and problem is. Highlights/ Skip to:   Juan Sequeda’s background (2:14)  Is AI for BI the way to go for proprietary analytics products? (4:30) Bolted-on AI versus transformational AI, and what customers are doing with current reporting (8:26) Knowing your product’s boundaries and when extending into adjacent customer workflows stops making strategic sense (14:46) Setting proper expectations for non-technical founders around what AI can “answer” with analytics (18:43) The role of customer problems in informing the prerequisite technology and data decisions (24:37) What's the actual lift to add chat-with-your-data capabilities to a SaaS product: data foundation, semantic layer, and the build-vs-buy call (33:38) Why Juan thinks every company should become “AI-native” (41:20) AI might theoretically make for a better analytics UX, but are users ready to change their behavior or abandon the analytics tools they use now? (46:00) How to follow Juan Sequeda (49:03) Links Catalogs & Cocktails Podcast Juan Sequeda’s LinkedIn  Juan Sequeda’s Substack

  7. Apr 28

    193 - Faster…or Better? Creating Value with Blue Ocean Thinking and AI-Powered Product Development

    Speed is often confused with good product thinking. The idea is that if teams can ship prototypes, dashboards, and models faster, they will automatically learn faster. But execution speed alone doesn’t ensure a clearer understanding of what’s actually worth building. Instead, teams often fall into a loop driven by demo feedback. They present working prototypes, and users respond to what they can see in the form of interface design, visualizations, or surface-level data behavior. While this feedback feels positive, it’s often misleading. Teams can end up reacting to presentation (UI) feedback only to find it does not change propensity to buy or increase user adoption. The key idea today is that prototypes can either be used to clarify the problem space and user needs or to validate the solution presented. Where I see most teams fail is that every artifact or prototype is seen as a solution to validate, and they can miss the forest for the trees. Another approach borrows from blue ocean thinking, which focuses on creating value by looking for overlooked opportunities in the empty space—beyond the known “problem space” your customer knowingly lives in now.  Because AI lets us move so fast with prototyping, I think there is an exciting possibility to explore the blue-ocean spaces where your product could evolve to produce value.  As always, we seek to go beyond building “technically right, effectively wrong”—which doesn’t make people buy, use, or refer your product.  Today, we look at what AI can help us to do to see even farther beyond the immediate problem space.  Highlights/ Skip to:   Where the idea for this episode came from (00:46) Why faster building of artifacts with AI doesn’t necessarily mean faster market validation (2:09) How understanding the problem space results in fewer prototypes being created (5:40) Using blue ocean strategy to arrive at new products worth paying for (08:23) Finding missed market opportunities  blocked by cost, tech limits, or risk (12:39) How AI-assisted user research fits into blue ocean thinking (14:33) The big picture: winners will figure out what’s worth building before they build it (20:42) Links Contact Designing for Analytics

  8. Apr 15

    192 – Product Usage Does Not = Value: Why “Adoption” Metrics Are Misleading You

    I’ve seen this challenge again and again with teams building analytics and AI products: nobody can define what quality to the end user means or how to measure. The answer? “Adoption.”  The problem is that “amount of usage” tells you nothing useful about your customer’s experience with your product beyond “it’s not zero.” So what should you be measuring instead so your buyers don’t quickly abandon once the end users get their hands on the keyboard (or agent!)?   The answer is to understand through qualitative measures what users’ experiences are like now, so you have an objective baseline from which to compare future product investment. When you can define their current experience’s quality, it’s much easier to imagine their better future, and you also now have a change you can measure. Measurable outcomes are the foundation of high-value, sticky B2B analytics and intelligence products—and when your end users’ lives are improved, the sales close, and the renewals aren’t questioned. So today, I jump into “how do you measure UX?” so you aren’t surprised when the sale doesn’t close or that renewal doesn’t come through unexpectedly.    Highlights / Skip to: Why I think product adoption (i.e. product usage analytics) are misleading as a means to define whether your solution is valuable to users (1:34) Getting a better baseline reading of user experience so you can improve their life and your sales/retention KPIs (4:56) How to measure, hypothesize, and observe if your product is working “well” (7:35) Discovering where your product is being appreciated (20:28) What about when AI is in the loop? (23:05) The risk of creating bigger messes with AI capabilities (28:20) How to gain useful insights from your customer exposure time (31:28) The quantitative metrics you can use to help measure UX outcomes  (36:17)  Why "ship it and see if it gets used" isn't a product strategy  (40:52) Links More Resources  Get 1x1 Help from me if you know your product’s value is opaque, or the user experience is hindering your sales or adoption goals

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Does the value of your insights, analytics, or automated intelligence product sometimes feel invisible to buyers and users? Does your product have impressive analytics and AI technology, but user adoption and sales still are not where you want them to be? While it has never been easier to build data-driven products, why does it still seem so hard to build indispensable data products that users can't live without—and will gladly pay for? I’m Brian T. O’Neill, and on Experiencing Data — a Listen Notes top 2% global podcast — I help founders and B2B software product leaders close the Invisible Intelligence Gap through solo episodes and interviews with leaders at the intersection of product management, UX design, analytics, and AI. If you’re building analytics, BI, or automated intelligence (AI) products, this non-technical show will help you better connect your product to outcomes, value, and the human factors that still matter — even in the age of AI. Subscribe today on all major platforms or browse the episode archive. Get 1-Page Episode Summaries In your Inbox: https://designingforanalytics.com/ed About Brian: https://designingforanalytics.com/bio/

Information

  • Creator
    Brian T. O’Neill from Designing for Analytics
  • Years Active
    2018 - 2026
  • Episodes
    100
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2019 Designing for Analytics, LLC
  • Show Website
    Experiencing Data w/ Brian T. O’Neill

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