Balancing Data & User Insights to Develop Ideas
A quick rant on identifying hypotheses that link to business outcomes
When looking to identify customer problems, you start with a user insight or a data insight from the business.
Not a groundbreaking statement, but it got me thinking. In my growth career, what % of my ideas/hypotheses were derived from data or users? To be honest, I significantly lean into the data world to find hypotheses and ideas for experimentation and this is something I am not okay with.
Growth at Jobber isn't positioned to solely focus on a user’s pain points. Yes, we look to reduce friction for our users and connect them to value, but we do so with the understanding that it will not only result in their success but also our success in key business outcomes. Every day we ask ourselves what type of impact our experiment would have on the business. This is the main reason I tend to use data as a crutch when identifying opportunities.
We start with data, find a gap, and then engage in user research. We watch users use the product in the specific area of interest and listen to phone calls through Gong to help understand the qualitative aspect of the problem. Not a bad process.
The issue I have is that we are leaving hypotheses on the table that can only be sourced from our users. If we only look at data first then we are only getting a piece of the story because we typically lock ourselves into obvious areas within acquisition, activation, and monetization. It's foolish for us to believe that we are catching all the inputs with dashboards and reports.
As you read many times, data needs user research, and user research needs data. On the opposite end, I've seen projects prioritized that were solely sourced from user insights. Data came into the picture further down the discovery phase, and as a result, the business impact wasn't felt. This is why I like using that question to filter ideas regardless if they were sourced from data or our users.
"What type of impact will this have on the business?"
This doesn't mean you should jump in and take big swings. Instead, provide everyone with the proper context of why you are fixing that bug, launching that feature, or changing your onboarding. The value to the user and the business impact is forever linked and we'd be kidding ourselves for ignoring that fact.
The lightbulb moment for me while thinking about this topic is a simple fact (duh, Connor) that by putting more time into understanding your users qualitatively you will quickly find things that aren't tracking that heavily influence those key metrics you've been staring at blankly for the last 3 hours. Data is only as good as its tracking and everyone has a responsibility to further our data capabilities and user research is the crux behind doing so.
Anyways, I'll stop my rant there but I do have a suggestion for all of you:
What % of your ideas come from users? What % of your ideas come from data?
Find a balance.
In either bucket, do you ask yourself what impact that idea can have on the business before moving forward?
Do it.
Are you clear on the expectations your company has based on the size and effort of your idea?
This is key. Know the expectations behind the business impact of your idea.
Does your strategy change at all when you're exploring a completely new (let's say, never been done before) feature or product?
I find it challenging to find any data on such ideas, and customers often cant articulate what they want in that sense. Where is the balance in that scenario?