Capstone: Build a Reporting Brief

Read the assembled brief four ways, validate it, and approve version 1.0.

See the situation

Bring together the decisions you have saved. Prepared examples and current-plan approval are separate checks.

Elena · Reporting lead

The case

Capstone: review the reporting brief

Inspect what the examples can show, validate the current saved plan, and approve only that version.

Read the assembled brief four ways, validate it, and approve version 1.0.

Your task

Repair the final reporting brief. Check its trend claim and cost scope before saving.

Need a little guidance?

You’re done when: The brief can be traced from headline back to records and definitions.

A reader should be able to follow the claim back to its records and calculation.

Need a reminder? Reopen the worked example

Watch one example first

Three bookings among six mature eligible requests is 50%; three among four worked requests is 75%. Both calculations can be correct, but they answer different questions.

Why this follows from the evidence

A reporting brief makes the reader’s question, denominator, exclusions, time window, and evidence limits visible so the number is not detached from its meaning.

GTM Lab

Saved locally

Metric Dictionary and Reporting Brief

sample-reporting-brief · v1 · draft

Inspect the prepared example

Repair the claim and test the brief with another reader

The prepared series end at 14% in both segments, but one rose from 6% and the other fell from 28%. The funder also needs to know what the cost statement includes.

Prepared Q1–Q4 comparison · 100 records per segment per quarterRead the level and direction together. Exact values and missing observations are in the table.

Segment A
Segment B

Prepared Q1–Q4 comparison · 100 records per segment per quarter: exact values
Period	Segment A	Segment B
Q1	6%	28%
Q2	9%	23%
Q3	12%	18%
Q4	14%	14%

Repair the headline for the operations ownerAdd the missing drill pathClarify the cost statement for the funding reader

Restoring this data activity…

Review four prepared reader examples

After the packet check, compare four prepared reader questions with the brief requirements. This review is guide-authored and is not calculated from live reporting data.

The owner, who can reassign peopleWhere it stopped, by segment, with a path into the records.
The decomposed stop-reason bucket and a drill-through path per metric.
The funder, who decides the spendThe outcome, the trend, and the cost per result.
An outcome metric, a trend on it, and a cost metric with its metering boundary stated.
The analyst, who has to reproduce itThe denominator, and what it leaves out.
A stated denominator, the incompleteness, and the direction it bends the answer.
The misreader, acting in good faithTo quote the best segment as a target and read a middling composite as partial health.
A record count beside every compared rate, and a composite shown with its components.

Run all 13 validation checks

The checks test the seams between sections, since every section was written while looking only at that section. Each runs by its stable ID and reports pass or fail with a reason.

Approve the current saved version

After the checks pass, what does approval mean for this brief?

The numbers in the report are now correct.The report now covers everything the business needs to see.Somebody can now disagree with a number in this report and point at exactly which choice they disagree with.

Your place saves as you go.

Chapter 9 of 90 complete