Making data-driven real

Recently, I expert-facilitated a workshop at a company having the desire to become data driven. Different from the product companies that I normally work with, this company is a service provider with a large amount of staff offering services to customers. The workshop participants included the CEO and head of business development, as well as several others that are in or close to the company’s leadership team.

In many ways, this looks to be the ideal setup as one would assume that we have all the management support we need and some of the smartest people in the company with us. This was even reinforced by several in the company sharing that they’ve been working with data for quite a long time. Nevertheless, we ran into a significant set of challenges and we didn’t nearly get as far as we’d hoped.

The first challenge was becoming concrete on specific hypotheses to test. Even though we shared concrete examples of hypotheses and associated experiments when we kicked off the brainstorming and teamwork, everyone was having an incredibly hard time to go from a high-level goal of increasing a specific business KPI, eg customer satisfaction, to a specific hypothesis and an associated concrete experiment. There are many reasons for this. An obvious one is that many people feel that ‘someone’ should ‘do something’ about the thing that they worry about but never spend many brain cycles thinking about what that would look like.