Data is an Added Sense - Commoncog

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One of the biggest misconceptions about data is that it somehow stands in opposition to ‘gut’, or ‘intuition’.

This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://commoncog.com/data-is-an-added-sense
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This post reminded me of this essay AVG(text) - by Benn Stancil - benn.substack by Benn Stancil about how the talking to customers part is more valuable but less scalable digestible than the data. Its not even that the data story contradicts what we understand from teh customer stories, they are often measuring very different things, and we need to use both, as you say. (Plus the bit about can LLMs analyze stories at scale which is also interetsing).

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I agree that this is going to be interesting. One of the problems I’ve found with qualitative interviews is that they take so damn long. I’m gearing up for another round of interviews with Commoncog members now, for instance — and I know it’s going to consume a huge chunk of my next three weeks. I’ve come to expect this: this was always the case in every business I’ve been a part of.

As a result, we just do these qualitative deep dives once a year or so. One thing that I’ve been wondering for awhile is if it’s possible to use LLMs (plus some surveying ‘pulse’ mechanism?) to get a lower fidelity qualitative signal from customers.

I’m interested to know if there are companies that do this.

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Wanted to chime in with an observation from @Sam, which I thought was quite sharp:

  • In this article I talk about the scenario — common in startups — where the folks are mostly driven by qualitative interactions with the customer. It’s more common for such folks to not have any ability to use data.
  • In big companies, you get this large, floating mass of people who come into the company and don’t actually have a good sense for the customer, nor of the operating domain. (And how can they? Their careers consists of 2-3 year stints at other large organisations). They make up for this with good use of data, but actually lack a ‘qualitative understanding of the customer’.

I should have spent more time describing that second point, but didn’t, due to my biases. Two different types of failure; two sides of the same coin.

The question for the latter group is perhaps a tad more interesting, and not something I’ve considered before: what new channels can you stand up that would allow you to ‘talk to’ or ‘be exposed to’ the customer?

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When I used to work in retail, the solution to this was to put people in stores doing the work. Of course, there you have the advantage that you can train people to do basic retail tasks quickly and there is always too much to do for the existing staff, so you can actually get some value from the workers while they get exposure to customers.

This also applies to work between departments/functions in large companies, which is also an area where there are often many people who have no idea what folks do outside of their small group. For instance, working in tech support or business analysis in IT are 2 ways to get developers and engineers exposed to what “the business” (a phrase which I despise and is always an excellent indicator of someone who has an insular worldview in my experience) actually does.

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