Everyone’s stacking certificates. Nobody’s asking the right questions.
I’ve been on LinkedIn again. I know, I know.
I have this thing with LinkedIn where I can’t fully leave it but I can’t fully enjoy it either. There are people on there worth knowing — genuinely interesting, doing real work, willing to have a real conversation if you get them in the DMs. But the feed? The feed is something else entirely. It’s a highlight reel dressed up as advice. Dashboards that look beautiful and say absolutely nothing. Posts that sound confident and mean even less.
And I’ll be honest — I’ve been that guy. More than once.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot this week, specifically around tools. Around how much we fetishize the tech stack in this field.
There’s this idea that if you know enough tools, you’re ready. Python, SQL, Tableau, Power BI, stack them up, screenshot the certificates, post it on LinkedIn, wait for the clients. I thought that too. I came from web development where being technically good was most of the job. You build a website, the client sees it, they understand what they bought. Clean transaction.
Data doesn’t work like that.
I’ve been going deeper into e-commerce analytics and the thing that keeps hitting me is how much of the real work has nothing to do with the tools. Like — okay, you can tell me a store made 2 million last month. So what? Is that good? Is it down from last month? Up? What’s driving it? Which product is carrying the whole thing and which one is quietly bleeding revenue? Where are customers dropping off and why?
Those aren’t technical questions. They’re just questions. The kind you have to already be asking before you even open a dataset.
That’s domain knowledge. And you can’t learn it in a weekend. You can’t certificate your way into it. It comes from sitting with a business problem long enough to actually understand what you’re solving for — and being honest when you don’t yet.
I’ve been working on something this week on the freelancing side that connects to this.
I went back through how I present my services and realised I’d been vague. Not intentionally, just — vague. I have five services and I’d been describing them the way you describe something when you half understand it yourself. Which means the people reading it definitely didn’t understand it.
So I went through each one and got specific. What do I actually do. What does the process look like. What does someone walk away with. Not a summary — an actual breakdown.
Because when someone has to ask you to explain your service again, that’s not an interested client. That’s a confused person being polite. The people I want to work with should be able to read what I do and already know if it’s for them. The conversation should start at yes, not at what does this even mean.
I don’t have a tidy lesson to wrap this up with. It’s just where my head has been this week — thinking about what I actually know versus what I just know how to do, and whether that gap is as wide as it sometimes feels.
Probably is. That’s fine. I’m still here.
Until next time — ponder this:
If you stripped away every tool you use, how much of what you actually know about your craft would still be left?