Read the brief

Every chapter before this one handed you a column list and a stated metric. A real stakeholder request hands you neither — just a claim, a deadline, and twelve tables you have to navigate yourself. This chapter is one scenario: read the brief, find the right tables, catch the trap that makes the naive number wrong, and write up your recommendation the way you'd actually send it. It's graded by the same rubric that graded the take-home labs, not by matching a query's output.