Description

How many users adopted the feature we just launched? Which customer segments use it most? Where are users dropping out of a funnel? When did a metric start declining? Is the change affecting everyone or only a specific group?

This book teaches you how to investigate questions like these yourself.

SQL taught through product problems

You won’t learn SQL as an abstract programming language. Every concept is introduced because it helps solve a real Product Management problem.

Starting with no previous SQL knowledge, you’ll learn how to:

• Explore unfamiliar tables and understand how product data is organized
• Select and filter the information you actually need
• Count users, events, and other product entities correctly
• Compare different customer segments
• Analyze how metrics change over time
• Combine information from different tables with JOIN
• Measure feature adoption
• Investigate funnels, activation, and retention
• Explore unexpected changes in product metrics
• Evaluate the impact of a launch
• Spot common mistakes that can lead to misleading conclusions

You’ll work with a fictional SaaS product throughout the book, progressively building the SQL skills needed to investigate realistic product scenarios.

More than learning SQL syntax

Knowing how to write SELECT, WHERE, GROUP BY, or JOIN is useful. Knowing whether your query actually answers the product question you intended to ask is even more important.

That’s why the book also focuses on the thinking behind the query: understanding what each row represents, choosing the right population, questioning the quality of your data, validating assumptions, and avoiding conclusions that the numbers don’t actually support.

Become more autonomous with product data

The objective isn’t to turn you into a Data Analyst or teach you advanced database engineering.

It’s to give you enough SQL to investigate everyday product questions yourself and arrive at conversations with Data and Engineering with evidence, context, and better questions.

By the end, an SQL editor won’t be a place reserved for technical teams. It will be another tool you can use when you need to understand what’s happening in your product.

Learn the SQL that actually matters for Product Management — and use data with greater independence and confidence.