CASE 1 - In tech Enabled Companies
Our previous product used to help users to extract data from MySQL / Postgres in a single click (of course there is some kind of setup time/costs). With that product, the user needs to write a perfect query to get the data in the format it is required, but hardly that's the case.
The user would download the data and do multiple steps of processing on Excel and create the report, sometimes the user used to do everyday.
Example : Daily Sales Performace report and YTD sales for the month - category level & salesman level.
Reports like these used to take like 20-30 minutes in the morning by the analyst, because the he/she could write sub-optimal SQL query and then download the required data and then make the reports.
CASE 2 - In mid/large companies
We provide data analytics services along with the products.
During that time we noticed one major thing regarding mid-size to large-size companies, they have a core system that acts as a system of record for the business and there is a reporting tool/visualization system.
Top Management or one level below always uses the visualization system to understand the operations at a high level but the same is hardly used in the below levels.
The major reason is, they don't want high-level views, they need operational-level views, which they create by downloading the data from the Core System and doing the necessary data processing steps, and creating the reports.
Solution
These insights lead us to build that users are not worried much about the precise data extraction from the systems or they are fine with the master data which has the required data/fields for their data
Their major challenge is creating the report repeatedly from the same master data .
This helped us to pivot to solve the problem for the business users who create reports for analysis or day-to-day operations.