Maren spent close to a decade inside operations teams that filed recurring reporting requests to a central analytics group. She noticed the same requests getting reworded, delayed, or quietly dropped, and started keeping a private list of what separated the requests that got answered fast from the ones that stalled. That list became the first draft of the brief template used in this program today. She now leads curriculum direction and facilitates most cohort workshops in the Chicago area and virtually.
About the program
Built by people who have sat on both sides of the request queue.
Before this became a training program, it was a set of habits three different teams kept reinventing on their own, because the alternative was watching good analysis requests die in a shared inbox.
How this started
A pattern noticed twice, then written down
Hodalu Ditime grew out of a simple observation. Operations and product managers were not bad at their jobs. They were often just untrained in a very specific skill: turning a business question into something a data team could act on without three rounds of clarifying questions.
Meanwhile, analysts and data teams were not slow by nature. Many of the delays people complained about traced back to a request that arrived without scope, without context, or without any clear decision attached to it. The fix wasn't a new tool or a faster team. It was a better first message.
The current curriculum was shaped through repeated sessions with real request threads, not built from a communications textbook. Templates changed when they didn't hold up in practice. Some modules exist only because a particular kind of request kept causing the same confusion across unrelated teams.
The people
Facilitators and curriculum leads
Click any card to read more about their background. Everyone teaching in this program has worked directly on either the requesting side or the analysis side of this exact problem.
Devon worked as a data analyst supporting several product teams before joining the program full time. Much of the "Reading What Comes Back" module comes from his experience watching well-scoped analyses get misread once they landed in a stakeholder's inbox. He focuses on translating analyst-side frustration into concrete phrasing that requesters can use without needing a statistics background.
Priya worked as a product manager scoping feature experiments and pricing questions before joining as a facilitator. She leads the team intensive format and specializes in helping product teams separate a genuinely urgent request from one that only feels urgent because it arrived without a deadline attached. Her sessions lean heavily on live rewriting rather than lecture.
James spent years designing internal workflow systems for operations departments and now focuses on the "Building the Habit" module. His interest is less in any single brief and more in what happens after a team adopts a new template: which parts stick, which parts get skipped under deadline pressure, and how to build a format that survives contact with a busy Tuesday.
How we teach
A few things we keep coming back to
Clarity over politeness
A brief that's easy to act on matters more than one that sounds considerate but leaves scope, timeline, and decision unclear.
Practice over theory
Sessions work from real request threads whenever possible, rather than abstract examples that don't resemble anyone's actual inbox.
Templates over talent
A repeatable format that a whole team can use is worth more than one person's natural gift for asking good questions.
Feedback loops over one-off fixes
The follow-up session exists because the first attempt at a new template rarely survives contact with a real deadline unchanged.