Data: Driving your solutions

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Posted May 06, 2022
Kylie Norwood

In today’s world, the importance of product data continues to grow and become more vital to a company’s success—stemming from a real need to understand the ever-changing consumer. As product owners, we all want to better answer the same two questions: how can we generate more success, and how can we better service our clients? Here’s how data fits into answering those questions:

Collecting understanding

First and foremost, collecting the business data will simply give you a better understanding of your company and its clients. From there, you have a starting point for your business’s core characteristics, strengths, weaknesses, and all around truths. This allows you to then make decisions based on those truths that are specific to your company. 

The process begins to build indicators that judge your performance and success, and as a result it gives you more knowledge about your customers. The more you know and understand about your clients, the more you can cater, build, and improve your product around those needs. This, in turn, creates an overall better experience. It allows for personalization that tunes to your client base, providing an adaptive environment for your customers as their needs evolve and change. Who doesn’t want that? 

Trusting your data

Now for the hard part: how exactly does a company become “data-driven”? The short answer is that it simply takes trust and confidence in the foundation of data you build. In order to collect the correct information you need to make these decisions, you also have to understand what is important to your company specifically. There’s no point in collecting the data unless you know what is driving your company-wide decisions in the first place. That’s vital to trusting any decisions that are made based on that foundation. 

Data-driven decision making is a different way of thinking. Rather than speculating, you are trusting raw numbers that exist within your own company’s data—so you need to make sure you have an understanding of what is important to your business, and what kind of questions need to be answered. 

Analysis that drives results

But trust alone isn’t necessarily sufficient. Collection needs to be paired with someone that can analyze and understand exactly what that data is telling you. And remember: Data can evolve. Any metrics or performance indicators that are used to make strategic decisions should be monitored for changes—a company always has the option to adjust accordingly as time proceeds. After all, that is the main reason you build this process in the first place. Once established, you can maintain to continuously stay on top of anything that needs improvement, but also to acknowledge what is working well. 

Why exactly is it beneficial to you in the long run? In the end, it improves both the quality of your product but also the experience of your clients. Data will lead you to what is best, but it also tells a story of successes and failures, which is always important to learn from. Not only that, but it can ultimately allow a company to save both money and time. Collecting and interpreting data through this process can make up for costly advertising, requirements of extra resources, or simply from playing a guessing game. Utilizing results can allow companies to make decisions more confidently and in turn, increase both profits and satisfaction of our clients. 

Absolute truths and aytm

Not only does this data-driven approach motivate the use of aytm’s platform for market research insights, but aytm as a company uses this process to enhance our client experience as well. It’s an interesting recursion—clients might use our product to make data driven decisions, but behind the scenes we use a similar process to make the experience better for you. 

Motivated by one of our core values, creativity, we are constantly embracing new ideas and approaches like this. We’ve seen the benefits of coming to conclusions using absolute truths specific to our clients rather than through speculation and assumptions. Adopting this increasingly common data driven system has allowed aytm to enhance our clients’ experience, understand ourselves more clearly, and monitor these solutions to continually make decisions that improve us all for the better.