How Shopify Built An In-Context Analytics Experience - Shopify

This post details the process of bringing analytics into the Orders page workflow. It covers identifying top-level metrics and dimensions based on merchant workflows and goals, understanding the 'shape of the data' for different merchant segments (order volumes, journey stage, fulfillment processes, geography, industry) to validate and refine metrics, prototyping the experience with real data and UX collaboration, and finalizing findings with a data specification sheet to ensure a single source of truth for queries. It also outlines the dataset design for new metrics, choosing an atomic grain of one row per fulfillment, in-transit, or delivery event, and the initial decision to build a batch pipeline for modeling before moving to streaming.