Getting Around the Data Delusion
“What is this data delusion?” you may ask. Wayne Cerullo explained it to me. When you think of data, you probably think of numbers. Those numbers represent something that you knew you needed to measure. But they don’t give you any insight into what they mean - the “why” behind them.
It’s the things you don’t know that you don’t know (Donald Rumsfeld’s unknown unknowns) that will hurt you.
Here’s an example he gave:
We've done so many projects where obvious behavior led to non-obvious learning. I'll mention a quick story for a major data security company. They were coming out with version 11 of software. …it's version 11… First of all, why do we need to know anything?
And second. What's the role of the person who’s coming out with version 11? Well, obviously to show how it's better than version 10. Why else would we be doing this? The ironic thing that they didn't know, nobody knew because it was obvious only in hindsight was that the last thing their customers wanted was how this version was better than the previous version. They didn't want to know that. In fact, the more you talked about it, the more they covered their ears. Why? Because from a buyer's perspective, what was obvious to buyers, but not to sellers was that you've already done 10 versions of this. So the fact that it's version 11 means you guys are on top of this.
New customers aren’t interested in the incremental improvements from 10 to 11. (Spinal Tap anyone?) They want to know how the software solves their problem.
The bottom line for the entire episode is that it is still (maybe more than ever) important to talk to potential customers as well as customers that bought from a competitor, about why they want or don’t want what you are offering. Maybe you’re just positioning your product or service incorrectly. And that needs to be done on a customer by customer basis when you finally get down to the sale.
Sometimes we’re too close to the product and it’s development to understand what makes it attractive. As Scott Galloway often says, “It’s hard to read the label from inside the bottle.”
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