When you first start a company, you don’t have access to much customer data. You can get signals from other places and buy some data sets, but you don’t have enough real customer interactions that can inform your decisions. In this phase, the narrative is how you make decisions. What’s narrative you ask?
It’s talking to people and understanding the full story. Understanding what drives them. If someone made a purchase on your website, you talk to them and ask them what made them sign up. Did they consider any alternatives? what pushed them over the edge and convinced them to make the purchase? These conversations give you a deeper understanding of the customer and therefore give you clarity on how to provide more value to the customer.
As a company scales (if you’re doing things right) you slowly start getting access to so much data that you may not be able to make sense of it all. Large tech corporations like Google and Amazon have access to seemingly infinite amounts of data. If you want funding for your project, you better bring some data to back it.
Although analyzing data is important, you can’t rely on data alone to drive your decisions. You need data and the narrative that goes with the data.
Data can tell you that productivity dropped by 25% after lunch in the warehouse, but it doesn’t tell you why there was a drop. Only by talking to people can you uncover that there was a potluck and everyone that had the mashed potatoes is now feeling sick.
Data is a good starting point, but you don’t get the full picture until you start asking questions.