Title: Assessment: The 10-Minute Executive Brief
Course: Advanced Data Science: A Graduate Course > Section: Module 3: Exploratory analysis, visualization, and the stakeholder story

Assessment: The 10-Minute Executive Brief

A non-technical VP of Operations sends you a real, ambiguous decision with almost no framing: “We can open one new location. East side or west side. You have 48 hours and 5 minutes of my time. Don’t send me a deck, tell me where to go and why.” You receive a messy operational dataset (foot traffic, existing store sales, demographics, costs, with gaps and inconsistencies). You do the exploratory analysis, deliver a one-page memo and a five-minute briefing with no jargon, title every chart with its plain-language takeaway, and state your uncertainty in words. Then you defend it live against a skeptical executive whose central question is “what would change your mind?”

What you will do, step by step:

1. Scope the decision: write the one comparison the VP actually needs (east versus west, on what single criterion), and the alternative you are weighing it against.
2. Do focused EDA: profile the relevant features, expose missingness and skew, and decide which data are trustworthy enough to inform the choice and which you will set aside.
3. Select two or three decision-relevant figures, and cut everything that is interesting but does not move the decision.
4. Title each figure with its takeaway, so the title alone (“West side has 30% more weekday foot traffic”) carries the point.
5. Choose honest encodings: proportional ink, full or clearly labeled axes, ordered or single-highlight color, and confirm each against the misleading-figure caveats.
6. Write the one-page memo: recommendation first, two or three reasons with the supporting figures, and a short honest statement of what you do not know.
7. Rehearse the five-minute brief out loud, cutting jargon and timing yourself, so the recommendation lands in the first thirty seconds.
8. Prepare for the live defense: list the two weakest points in your own analysis before the executive finds them.
9. Prepare a genuine answer to “what would change your mind?” naming the specific evidence that would flip your recommendation.

What to submit: a one-page decision memo (recommendation, reasons, stated uncertainty), the two or three supporting figures with takeaway titles, and a five-minute recorded or live briefing followed by the live defense.

How it is graded:

Criterion | What strong work shows | Pts
Decision relevance | Every figure and sentence serves the east-versus-west choice; nothing decorative survives; the recommendation is explicit and arrives first. | 17
Principled EDA | Distributions, missingness, and skew are examined; untrustworthy data are identified and set aside with a stated reason rather than silently used. | 17
Honest encoding | Ink is proportional, axes are full or clearly labeled, color is ordered or a single highlight; no truncated baseline or dual axis manufactures an effect. | 17
Plain-language takeaways | Each chart title states an actionable finding; the memo is free of jargon a VP would not use; a non-technical reader leaves with the correct point. | 17
Uncertainty communicated | What is not known is stated plainly in words, without false precision, and scaled to how much it should temper the recommendation. | 16
Live defense | Answers unscripted follow-ups about this dataset and this decision calmly, concedes real weaknesses, and gives a concrete, honest answer to “what would change your mind?” | 16
Total | 100

◆ Why this resists generative substitution: A generated memo can sound polished, but it collapses under unscripted follow-ups about this specific dataset and this decision. The executive asks why you dropped the store with missing weekend traffic, what the skew in the cost column did to your comparison, and what single new number would flip you from east to west. Only a student who actually did the EDA and owns the judgment can answer those in real time.

“Advanced Data Science by Michelle Blomberg is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.”