Dorith Kleinstein

Fractional Senior Analyst

I’m a fractional Senior Analyst, and I’m taking work on now. Fractional means I work with a company for a defined period of time rather than as a full-time hire.

I work with small companies, and with small autonomous teams inside larger ones.

Some of the situations I get called into

The business runs on a few Excel files, and they contradict each other.

You pay for software that does a hundred things you don’t need, and not the few that would actually help.

There’s a question whose answer should be in the data you already have, and nobody has had the time to answer it properly.

Someone has decided you should be using AI, and nobody has checked whether your numbers can support it.

How I start

Not with a quote. With a short paid review: I look at what you have, talk to the people who use it and the people who built it, and write back what I see. For some jobs the review ends with something working that you can test, so you can see it before you spend on the rest.

Then you decide what happens next, and I’ll tell you what I’d recommend, including whether you need me at all.

What I do

I speak client user, client manager, programmer, and QA, and I’ve been doing this on projects big and small since before high tech was a household word.

Business analysis: working out what the question really is, and what it would take to answer it.

Small custom applications: built to fit the way you already work, for when buying a product costs more than the problem does.

Data analysis: SQL and Python, exploratory and statistical work, and dashboards and visualizations people can actually trust. Sometimes forecasting, A/B testing or a predictive model, when one earns its place. My published work is built with dbt, BigQuery, Looker Studio and pandas.

How I use AI

I’ve been using AI tools for over a year, and by now they’re part of how I work.

I know that makes people wary, and with reason. These tools make mistakes.

I question everything and I check everything. I’m in the driver’s seat of anything I build, and I have been for my own work, for the companies I worked for, and for clients.

I use AI as an extra pair of hands: my programmer, my researcher, my marketing consultant. If it were a person, it would have quit by now over how much I pick at the details.

Nothing I build runs AI quietly in the background. If a solution uses it, I’ll tell you why it’s better than the version without it, and why it’s safe.

There’s almost always a way to build it without AI. If that’s the version you want, that’s the version I’ll build. It’s your call, not mine.

No black boxes.

If any of this sounds familiar

Write to me at dorithkleinstein@gmail.com. Tell me what the situation is, as you see it. A few lines are plenty. If I think I can help, I’ll tell you what a review would look like for you and what it costs, before you commit to anything. If not, I’ll tell you that too.