Definition
Business intelligence (BI) covers the tools and processes that collect data from across a company, such as sales, finance, operations and marketing, and turn it into reports and dashboards for decisions.
BI vs product analytics
| Business intelligence | Product analytics | |
|---|---|---|
| Data | Many systems, often in a warehouse | Events from the product |
| Questions | Revenue, costs, operations | Behaviour: what users do and whether they return |
| Typical users | Finance, leadership, analysts | Product, engineering, growth |
| Skills | Often SQL and modelling | Charts, funnels, retention without SQL |
Using both
BI tells you revenue fell in a region; product analytics tells you which step in onboarding those customers stopped at. Many teams send product events to both: to a product analytics tool for day-to-day questions, and to a warehouse for company-wide reporting.