Reports were segments
Every report I built was a segment. So I built segments.
I had built customer, acquisition, churn, Amazon, app behavior, attribution, machine and geography reports, and they kept getting better. Then I saw that almost every one of them was just a segment of the business, visualized. I stopped building reports and built the primitives underneath: segment, measure, derived claim.
I was going fast in the wrong direction, and fast hid it.
WHAT HAPPENED
The reports kept getting better
Claude Code made it possible to move ridiculously fast, so I built a lot of reports. New customers, lost customers, returning customers, checkout abandonment, machines, geographies. Every time I thought of another way to see the business, I went and built it.
WHAT I FOUND
The reports were not the thing
One morning I woke up and realized I had it backward. People who bought for the first time. People who left. People who came back. People who bought on Amazon before they ever bought direct. Each report was a segment with a picture on it.
WHAT CHANGED
Primitives instead of views
I stopped building reports and started building segment, measure and derived claim. Claude Code did not see the pattern before I did, and I had to argue with it for a while. Once it understood, it helped me rebuild around it absurdly fast. The tool could build anything I could specify. It could not tell me I was specifying the wrong thing.