The Too Embarrassed to Ask Series

What began as a passion project became my LinkedIn series, “Too Embarrassed to Ask.”

I don’t know when it happened, but data literacy in CPG has seriously declined. The “data theater” in vendor pitches is exhausting, and posts on LinkedIn are often amateur and cringey:

• Scorecard screenshots that violate professional etiquette and the terms of service of the data provider

• Impressive-looking charts without an axis (or worse, a made-up metric)

• Data points that said very little about how a brand was really performing

AI slop made it even worse.

Then something clicked: as innovative founders and senior leaders at emerging brands skipped the traditional big CPG career path, they missed some of the training that came with it. Concepts that were second nature to me and other blue-chip CPG alums were becoming the language of subject matter experts, not the shared vocabulary of a high-performing commercial team.

These aren’t obscure analytics concepts. They’re the metrics retailers use to evaluate a business, and they’re no different than understanding a P&L.

So I created “Too Embarrassed to Ask” as a friendly PSA for my LinkedIn connections who might have had some of these questions but were too embarrassed to ask. These are the concepts I’ve coached my entry-level category analysts on throughout my career.

The response was incredible! People from all corners of the industry reached out, and the series sparked many fantastic conversations. It introduced me to many new connections and showed the strong demand for making CPG data easier to understand.

Thanks for reading.