Data Driven Decisions

Research indicates more than 90% of product organizations believe data-driven decisions are important, but in fact, roughly half admit they don’t use data to make their decisions. We find this fascinating.

For those who do leverage data – are you leading with data, or lagging with it? Do you use data to identify new opportunities, or are you using data to support the new opportunity? Or, are you avoiding the research because the problem to solve is a priority-pet-project of a business leader?

What types of data are you using? Visit and usage metrics, behavioral insights, competitive and/or consumer research, ethnography and other UX qualitative and quantitative disciplines? When making a product decision, are you using evidence to support your investment, or (like half of the organizations out there according to surveys), are you defaulting to intuition-based decisions?

When we talk about data-driven decisions, there are two basic ways to validate the product hypothesis. Experimentation (good for low-risk, low-investment, high value); and Discovery (necessary for high-risk, high-investment, high value). The former uses inductive logic while the latter relies on deductive reasoning.

A good digital strategy is to remove the emotions from the decision-making process and there is no better way to do that than with data.