Oh absolutely, I've seen this pattern play out in my own work too. In my line of product marketing, pure exploratory EDA isn't an everyday thing, but it crops up often enough to matter. Here's how I've seen it break down:
🔍 Stakeholder "fishing trips" - Someone asks for "cool insights" with zero business question attached, just want something shiny for a PR angle. That's basically freeform exploration, and yeah, it happens maybe a couple times a year. Feels like panning for gold.
✅ Validation & sanity checks - This is where EDA lives for me most days. Before I dive into answering a specific question, I'll poke around the data to make sure I understand the structure, spot any weird outliers, and confirm my assumptions hold. It's like stretching before a run - not the main event but essential.
💡 Problem scoping - When the team is chewing over a vague opportunity ("should we target this segment?"), I'll do a lighter EDA to see if there's enough signal to justify a full deep dive. If the data shows promise, we kick off a proper initiative. If it's a dead end, we save ourselves wasted effort.
So yeah, EDA in the pure "let's see what we find" sense isn't a daily ritual for me either, but it's woven into the workflow in more subtle ways. Definitely a useful muscle to keep trained.
