Who am I?
I’m John Yuill. I have close to 20 years of working with data to improve decision-making, in agency, consulting, and in-house roles. Most recently, I spent 14 year at Electronic Arts, becoming a Director of Marketing Analytics, managing a full stack analytics team focused on marketing and customer support data and insights.
Since early 2025, I have been operating independently, working to promote decision-maker that is more reliable, faster, and made with more confidence through effective use of data.
What is Figure 4?
The mission of Figure 4 is to “break down barriers between data, understanding and decisions”, closing the gap between the ever-growing accumulations of data and the decisions that can be improved by using this data effectively.
Too often, the full value of data is not being leveraged because it is not being made available in a way that connects with the needs of decision-makers. As many others have noted, data by itself has little value on its own. The value is locked inside it, only realizable after it has been selected, processed, presented, integrated into workflows in ways that make it relevant, useful, and usable by people who are in a position to take advantage of it.
There are many pieces to the data puzzle and my focus here is on:
- ensuring data sources are developed around key requirements, with flexibility and scalability in mind.
- transforming and combining data in ways that unlock value that is greater than the sum of its parts.
- leveraging rich data visualizations to facilitate understanding of the data, applying leading practices from the best research and examples in this area.
- developing data products that further extend the power of data visualization with models and simulation that enables deeper understanding and decision support.
And, of course, all with a pinch (or more) of AI into the mix. ;)