Response To: Data is Useless Unless You Can Act on It

In every data wave, the companies that transform data into actionable insights are the most valuable because their products not only identify but solve problems. Knowing about an issue without understanding the mechanics required to fix it causes paralysis.

In Tom’s recent post, Data is Useless Unless You Can Act on It, he describes a “three step pattern with data waves”: collection, presentation, action.

Most companies don’t close the loop and only focus on solving one or two of these. For example, Google Analytics provides incredibly valuable data, displayed in pretty graphs but they don’t tell you what you could or even should do with it.

This produces immense inefficiencies as data analysts/scientists spend countless hours extracting insights from data, manually feeding that back into the product. Additionally, consumers of this data piece together multiple tools and data sources making this process incredibly time-consuming and error-prone. Whoever can close the loop from data collection to actionable insights will rule.

As evangelized in lean methodology, you must continually re-evaluate and pivot based on the what you learn. Ultimately, startups are just a series of assumptions. Understanding which are correct or incorrect, faster, is key to execution.