Practice — Hot · The Acceleration Announcement
Skills focus. Time intelligence in anger: monthly YoY, base effects, and
stopping a premature headline.
Ungraded, open-ended. Continue from Medium's model.
Scenario
The CEO saw two numbers on your Performance page — 2025 grew +12.0%, and June 2026 grew +15.9% over June 2025 — and drafts an investor letter:
"Growth is accelerating: from 12% last year to nearly 16% and climbing."
The CFO wants your read before the letter goes out. "And climbing" is checkable — check it.
Requirements
- Build the instrument. A table of the six 2026 months with
[Total Revenue],[Revenue LY], and[YoY Growth %]— one matched window per row. - Read it honestly. Write down the six YoY figures. Is the sequence climbing?
- Explain the outlier. One month's YoY towers over the others. Before crediting 2026, look at the same month of 2025 in your Lesson 1 memory (or a 2025 monthly table). What is actually driving that number? This pattern has a name in financial analysis — base effect — and your job is to explain it in one plain sentence.
- Write the read for the CFO — four or five sentences: what the monthly series supports, what it does not, what February's number really is, and what you would say instead of "accelerating."
Hint — if your six numbers look different from a classmate's
Check that the visual's month field comes from Dates, that 2026 is the only year in context, and that no leftover category or region filter survives from Medium. Identical models produce identical YoY — any difference is a context difference.
Reflection
- The CEO's claim used two true numbers. What made the conclusion drawn from them unsafe, and which single visual would have prevented the draft?
- Where else in this course did a "spectacular" number turn out to be an artifact of what it was being compared against? (There are at least two.)