Using a pie chart is as controversial as showing up to a vegan potluck with a charcuterie platter. Pie charts, which compare a part (the slice) to a whole (the pie) are extremely popular data visualizations and also extremely bad at visualizing data.

• The whole point of graphs and charts is to make numbers easier to understand, but pie charts can distort our perceptions of data.
• It’s a chart that’s very easy to misuse, especially when you cram too much information into it.

But when the conditions are just right, a pie chart can be exactly what you need. Here are a few instances when you should use a pie chart:

When you’re comparing two or three very different data points. For example, if you’re looking at website traffic numbers this month by source, and you have 5% from Google Search, 30% from YouTube ads, and 65% from email, you could show that via pie.

For pairing the pie chart with other, more useful charts. For example, if you include a stacked bar chart of total revenue for three different products each month, it may also be useful to include the total percentage breakdown of this year’s revenue by product.

• Pairing the two makes the insights more impactful than either alone.

When you only want to highlight one data point in a percentage analysis. If you want to show Apple’s market share of the smartphone industry and you don’t care about the other players in the market (who needs the green text bubble anyway?), you’d only have two sections in your pie chart—Apple’s market share percentage and “Other.”

So yes, a pie chart can be useful in some cases. But when in doubt, please put the pie down.—KL

Hold onto your 10 items or less: Big changes are happening for Amazon’s brick-and-mortar grocery ventures. The tech giant is pivoting its food strategy after struggling to give Costco’s rotisserie chicken a run for its money.

• Among other changes, it’s redesigning Amazon Fresh stores to be less robotic and opening delivery to non-Prime members.

But will it be enough?

• Amazon purchased Whole Foods for almost $14b in 2017 and opened its first Fresh store in 2020, but the co has been struggling to gain traction amid prosciutto-thin margins and stiff competition from big tunas like Walmart and Kroger.

So when’s the right time for Amazon to call it quits? Turns out, the best way to know that is before you even start.

In the lead-up to any new project, campaign, or experiment, make sure to define a clear-cut idea of what success will look like. This helps to:

• Align on expectations. There’s nothing worse than happily coming to your boss with project updates only to find they expected more.
• Prevent goalposts from shifting. Especially with your own pet projects, it can be easy to justify poor results or continue for longer than expected. Sometimes, you’ve got to kill your darlings, and success metrics make that decision a bit easier.

To figure out your success metrics, choose a quantitative measure that accurately defines performance.

• For example, if you’re launching a new product, you may want to outline expected sales in the first 30, 60, and 90 days.
• If you’re experimenting with a marketing campaign, success metrics could include Likes, payments, or conversion rate.

And be realistic about what’s possible for your project. You don’t want to set the bar too high and fail, or set it too low and lose trust with stakeholders.

The good news: As long as you define success metrics, you’re already in better shape than most teams—so go ahead and treat yourself to a trip to the Whole Foods hot bar.

WTF is strategy? It’s something that means everything and also nothing. You may even need a double dose of Advil to get through defining it.

But somehow, your boss is already asking you to plan your team’s 2024 strategy.

Enter: Strategic Planning, the Brew’s one-week virtual course that takes the guesswork out of quarterly planning.

• Learn how to bring clarity to your business and impress your boss’s boss in the process, just in time for annual reviews.
• Bonus: You’ll learn from expert guests from Talkbase, Meta, and Morning Brew.

The course starts this Monday, August 14—we’ll plan to see you there.

Reserve your spot now.

Just when you thought the news about in-person work was dying down, we go and dredge up the waters again. But don’t start sweating in your slippers—this time IRL is just pretend.

We’ll give you a company name (with a clue or two), and you guess where its headquarters are located. Hint: None of them are in NYC or the Bay Area.

• Urban Outfitters might still give you flashbacks to choker necklaces, but corporate is keeping it buttoned up in this city (and probably wears a bib if there’s cheesesteak on the menu).
• Outdoor retailer Cotopaxi is known for colorful patterns and befriending llamas as spokes-animals. We hope they’re not too salty about traveling so far north—and that they know how to swim.
• Atlantic magazine just moved offices downriver to a hipper location, but before that employees went to work in the very same building that opened the floodgates for political scandal names.
• In 2010, Rocket Mortgage (formerly Quicken Loans) ditched the suburbs and motored into this Rust Belt downtown, sparking a citywide revitalization.
• Y’all better guess Bumble’s headquarters quick, before your barbeque gets cold and things start getting weird.

Read: How to build a life you don’t need to retire from.

Read, but like book reading: Five best books on advertising.

Listen: There’s playing Snake on your mom’s Nokia, and then there’s retro retro—here’s how Tetris came to be.

Learn: A founder’s guide to assessing strengths and weaknesses.

Dress to impress: Rent the Runway co-founder Jennifer Hyman credits collaboration and open dialogue as some of the keys to her success (the org is now worth $120m).