How do you define the world of Data Operations or more broadly, the importance of data in a revenue organization?

Most people start by looking at the data points itself (e.g. data quality), then the coordination of data between teams (e.g. data compliance and governance) and don’t always mention what I think is a key element: the motion created by people in different departments using shared data to drive shared goals.

Data operations is the intersection of these different actions and the role of activating, aligning, and shaping this data to facilitate the rest of the organization’s work. Most of the time it’s only noticed when it’s not working.

Here’s a sample visual of how data operations relates to the rest of the business:

You Need Data To Run Your Business

You need to identify key data points to run your business. These markers are going to be different in each business, but they need to provide a North Star that everyone looks at to see how things are going. Is it 12-month trailing Revenue? Is it the New Customer Count? Is it churn rate? Is it initial signups?

It’s probably going to be some combination of the above that forms the basis of weekly, monthly, and quarterly conversations to see how you’re doing. These ought to be things that can be easily tracked, are relevant to the business, are specific enough to act on, and not too hard to create.

Once you have the “North Star” metrics, each department has sub metrics (inputs) that they track to control the part of the business they influence.

Examples of these include:

• Sales Development Representatives track new meetings
• Customer Service reps track happy and sad customers
• Product teams track shipped features
• and Salespeople track closed-won deals

Making these inputs work together to tell the story is the reason we align data between systems. If you can’t compare the outputs from one department to another, it’s a bit hard to make sense of how the business is doing.

Activity != Communication

Have you ever seen a situation where one department is hitting metrics and another department wonders what they are doing?

This could be the result of activity without communication.

A good metric measures activity and suggests progress toward a shared goal. A great metric is understood by the whole company because it is either easily matched with a shared goal or is accompanied by continued communication about the achievements of that team.

Activity on its own can look like a rocking chair: measuring energy and movement but not going anywhere in reality.

Photo by engin akyurt on Unsplash

The Traffic Light Theory of Communication

If you’re familiar with this problem, you are likely the person who knows the most about your data and what it means on a microscopic level. You also intuit that your boss knows somewhat less detail about the data, and their boss a bit less.

So how do you make this information relevant? You need to have a shared understanding, something like “this measurement means we’re green, this one means we’re yellow, and this means we’re red” to help the rest of the business orient to the information you know in detail.

Think of this as a A/B testing of your message to other departments within your company. If they don’t understand the importance of things you think are important, they literally can’t speak to you (and you to them) on the same level on business data where you need to collaborate.

If your idea is not simple, make it simpler. It needs to be a 30 second pitch – 1 to 2 sentences that almost anyone in the company will comprehend and then have an idea how to relate what they are doing to the data you’re sharing.

The Company Needs You to be Right … When Asked

Activity + Communication = the potential to be right. Now, which problem are you solving? Hopefully it’s one the company needs you to solve. Urgent and important problems are the ones to focus on here, not just the loudest or the biggest problems. This might mean keeping a list of the “things to solve next” to avoid getting distracted from the things you need to solve right now. By the way, the things you need to solve right now might not be the most interesting. But they are probably the most important.

When you get asked? That’s the time to shine. Take your metrics, your activity, the relevance to the situation, and the demonstration that the effort will make a difference to the company’s bottom line. That’s the recipe for a winning project.

What’s the takeaway? It doesn’t matter if you have a great metric if no one knows what it means or how it will help your company.

Recently, an image about data went viral on Linkedin. This grouping of LEGOs, organized by Mónica Rosales Ascencio, uses these colorful bricks to remind us that data itself is not all that useful until we explain it.

That Lego meme has been going around as a way to explain why data or story alone do not tell a good data-driven story. Here’s another version from Reddit that reminds us that the story itself needs to have a hook or a reason for the reader to believe to make it meaningful.

Designing your story so that it conveys a “why” is even more important than writing the story. Who’s the intended audience? What do they want to learn? Why should they be paying attention to what you have to offer?

Where is this evident almost every day? In slides, visuals, decks, presentations, and whatever we call them these days.

What you want to do in slides

In slides that you are building to share ideas, have one idea per slide. Really. That it’s it. Everything should flow from the idea and be immediately obvious to the person you’re asking to review it.

One way to do this is to have a single thought accompanied by a beautiful image. Yes, a great image is worth a thousand words, partly because we process visual information so much faster than hearing or reading and translating words into feeling and action.

For your next slide presentation, think very mechanically at first on every slide about the following:

1. What’s the point of this slide (the one thing you need them to take away
2. What is your supporting evidence (yes, the #data.)
3. How are you illustrating that data to prove your point?
4. Now, think of a one line elevator pitch you would give if you were in the room with someone reviewing your slide. That’s probably your title.
5. Next, think of any reasons the person reading the title of your slide might see something else on that slide and not feel the information is congruent. Fix those things.

Of course excellent grammar and consistent tone and voice are important. But also avoid font crimes (you only need one or two fonts and two or three point settings in most illustrations).

(A bonus pet peeve: align your objects. Left aligning, center aligning, horizontal or vertical – just make it all align to a grid. Future you will thank you.)

Need some great examples?

• pitch decks
• tips on improving your decks

What you don’t want to do in slides

There are many negative examples of what not to do in Powerpoint. This is one of my favorites, exhibiting what Lincoln might have used to share the Gettysburg Address.

Here are a few rules to avoid in your slides.

Don’t tell everything in a single slide. Don’t provide endless detail in a slide. Don’t use a million fonts, colors, and sizes in a slide. Just the facts, presented in a clear and concise way, with one idea per slide.

Telling the story of your data

What’s the one thing you want someone to get from your slide? Does your data back that up and bolster it, while staying easy to understand?

Telling the story of your data is not always straightforward, even if the data seems like it makes sense to you at the time. Start with the idea, then point to the information.

If your data is contradictory, lead with questions that you want to resolve to move forward. Ultimately, the goal of using data in a story is to drive a decision.

What’s the takeaway? Stay simple when you make slides. Focus on one idea that you want to bring home, and align your data (or call out inconsistencies in your data) to bolster that idea.

Have you recently read about a product and thought: “it does too much?” Yet it’s also easy to disqualify a product or service as too narrow and “not for me”. How do you split the gap and build for the people who really want (and need) what you are selling without simply disappearing into the noise?

Taking a look at an everyday need (daily frequency, high recall, habit-forming) is a good frame for thinking about product decisions. Take the mundane experience of drinking coffee (sorry tea drinkers, this applies to you as well but the parameters might be different.)

As a coffee drinker, I want to have a hot beverage that stays warm, is true to taste, and (ideally) doesn’t spill. It would be great if that was a portable container, and was reusable. Bonus points if the container was nicely designed, had a good feel when held as a cup, and was durable.

I can imagine what you might be thinking at this point: why bother having a design discussion about a coffee cup? It’s exactly because the discussion is mundane that it’s important. Design decisions about materials might be optimized for heat retention (stainless steel liner) or grip (handle, or grippy finish) or the top (does it have one, and how easy is it to remove or drink out of) or price (is the target market $5, $10, or $50).

This coffee cup wins for me because it does a few things really well:

1. Keeps the coffee warm for a long time
2. Doesn’t spill easily
3. Easy to hold

Note that it doesn’t have a handle. The traditional mug design wasn’t followed here. It also isn’t the cheapest coffee mug I have. Yet it’s the one I use every day.

What are the lessons you can take to your next product or design decision? Do fewer things well, and buyers will find you. Be open to changing long-held beliefs, especially around habit-driven items. Measure the results based on input goals and output results. And enjoy your coffee!