Analytics didn’t fail me — my memory did

For a long time, I assumed I needed better analytics.

More dashboards.
More breakdowns.
More precision.

But when I looked back at older campaigns, the problem wasn’t missing data.

It was missing context.

I could see what happened, but not why I made certain decisions at the time.
What assumption I was operating under.
What tradeoff I thought I was making.

Without that, reviews turn into reconstruction.
I catch myself filling gaps with stories that feel right, not necessarily true.

Lately I’ve been thinking of analytics as outcomes, not explanations.
The explanation lives somewhere else — usually in decisions I never wrote down.

Curious how others handle this when reviewing past work.
Do you add context as you go, or mostly reconstruct it later?