18 Things I Learn From

Winning with Data

Introduction

18 Things I Learned From Winning With Data

We recently read Winning with Data by Tomasz Tunguz. It’s a short, but insightful book that we’d recommend to all entrepreneurs.

Here's 18 things we learned from the read.

1

�e data that companies store today has exploded.

With so much data to analyze, cutting through the clutter to unearth real insights is a challenge.

Why It Matters?

18 Things I Learned From Winning With Data

Why It Matters?

According to IDC, from 2013 to 2020, the digital universe will grow by a factor of 10, from 4.4 trillion to 44 trillion gigabytes. It more than doubles every 2 years.

Why It Matters?

2

Data is cool...and should be immediately accessible.

Data has never been cooler with today’s millennial workforce driving that feeling. Since many of them grew up on the internet, they expect answers to be at their fingertips (Siri, Alexa, Google).

18 Things I Learned From Winning With Data

Why It Matters?

3

Starved for insight, employees substitute instinct, gut, back-of-the-envelope calculations, estimates, and other short-circuited research to decide.

The HIPPO (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion) is just another opinion if not backed up by data. Data forces decisions to based on merit alone.

18 Things I Learned From Winning With Data

Why It Matters?

4

Company “data brawls” are very common and the source

is always the same.

Without a universal lexicon, confusion is inevitable and conflict unavoidable.

18 Things I Learned From Winning With Data

Why It Matters?

There is no single definition of each metric the company uses, and there’s no canonical place to access that data.

5

A Data Dictionary is a universal set of de�nitions of your company’s

most important metrics.

Why It Matters?

The first step in becoming data driven is defining key metrics, getting agreement across the team on those definitions, and making those definitions readily available in a centralized, living document. This “Rosetta Stone” allows for productive conversations about the data and accelerates decisions.

18 Things I Learned From Winning With Data

6

Data must be part of every important discussion and decision.

When data is a part of every important discussion and decision, anyone in the company can contribute (and defend) their idea. This type of culture is empowering to employees by giving them the tools these need to research, explore, and argue their ideas.

Why It Matters?

18 Things I Learned From Winning With Data

7

Data analysis is the norm at Facebook.

18 Things I Learned From Winning With Data

Facebook is pretty successful. Perhaps we should look for ways to emulate the culture they’ve built?

Why It Matters?

Of the company’s 4,600 employees, at least 1,000 query data daily. Leveraging the infrastructure to help the company make critical business decisions, drive product changes, and push the company forward.

8

�e Best Companies Run on Data.

18 Things I Learned From Winning With Data

The best performing companies not only use data as a historical tool to better understand what happened in the past and why it happened, but they truly operationalize their data.

Why It Matters?

9

Operationalizing your data is using data to improve the business’s performance.

18 Things I Learned From Winning With Data

Operationalizing the data means you’ll consult the data (through reporting or running specific custom queries) before making material changes. It means changing the way a company operates in the afternoon based on the data from the morning. It’s empowering everyone from front line employees to executives to use data throughout their day to tune their actions.

Why It Matters?

10

We have observed that the very best companies create repeatable

decision-making practices.

18 Things I Learned From Winning With Data

A repeatable process is important because when backed into a corner, a decision maker will irrationally defend his decision (and protect his reputation) even if the decision is clearly the wrong one. Data relieves people of this prideful irrationality.

Why It Matters?

11

Culture is the single biggest contributor to becoming a data-driven company.

18 Things I Learned From Winning With Data

When hiring you should look for the following traits in candidates: curiosity, collaboration, and a desire to use data for decisions.

Why It Matters?

12

One of the most important consequences of becoming a data-driven organization

is that anyone in the company can contribute, a trajectory-altering idea and defend it with data.

18 Things I Learned From Winning With Data

Empowering and addictive, this type of collaboration invites meritocracy.

Why It Matters?

13

Parkinson’s Law of Triviality is the reality that companies spend a disproportionate

amount of time on trivial issues. Incisive data combats this vortex.

18 Things I Learned From Winning With Data

Why It Matters?

Ever sat in a trivial meeting that never ended? Data slashes debate time in meetings by focusing the team on the right questions.

14

�e results don’t always need to be incredibly accurate. O�entimes, directional data provides just as much value as very high resolution data.

18 Things I Learned From Winning With Data

Why It Matters?

Many times, a quick approximation provides just the guidance the team needs to decide the relative priority of an effort or new project. Ballparking (estimating the order of magnitude of a result) can save you significant amounts of time and effort to determine if you should proceed with calculating a more precise answer.

15

Data pushes us to experiment and experimentation is at the core of

innovation because it equips every employee to support their

argument with data.

18 Things I Learned From Winning With Data

When data is democratized and employees are encouraged to answer their questions, any employee can birth and back up the next great idea for your company.

Why It Matters?

16. Data education, data literacy, and data tooling are the 3 key ingredients to evolving a company’s

culture to becoming more data-driven.

16

Data education, data literacy, and data tooling are the 3 key ingredients

to evolving a company’s culture to becoming more data-driven.

18 Things I Learned From Winning With Data

Everyone wants to know how to build a data-driven culture. Well, here’s the blueprint: 1) Develop the right metrics and language; 2) Educate the team to analyze data without bias; 3) Reward curiosity with the best tools to find the right information; 4) Maximize the speed of the company to decide.

Why It Matters?

17

Operationalizing data will be the competitive advantage of the future.

18 Things I Learned From Winning With Data

Change today is more complex, faster, and harder to predict than ever before. Consequently competition in business has never been more demanding. The only antidote to this increasing volatility is data.

Why It Matters?

18

Actionability is a key attribute of useful data.

18 Things I Learned From Winning With Data

Tracking metrics for the sake of tracking metrics is useless and time consuming. The data should always inform an action. Ask yourself, “what decisions will doing this analysis inform?”

Why It Matters?

18 Things I Learned From Winning With Data

Want to get more from your data? We can help.