Metadata
- Author: Benn Stancil
- Full Title:: Data’s Day of Reckoning
- Category:: 🗞️Articles
- Document Tags:: Data culture, Data Team Vision and Mission,
- URL:: https://benn.substack.com/p/day-of-reckoning
- Finished date:: 2024-02-18
Highlights
all of these companies operate at such an extraordinary scale that seemingly trivial improvements are amplified into meaningful financial gains. (View Highlight)
In that light, when the rest of us struggle to keep up, it’s not because we don’t have their tools or cultures; it’s because we don’t have their data. The data of a mid-sized B2B SaaS product simply doesn’t have the potential energy of Google’s search histories, or of an Amazon’s browsing logs. [4] If the latter examples are the new oil, the former is a new peat bog. No matter how good the tools are that clean and analyze it, how skilled the engineers are who are working on it, or how mature the culture is around it, it’ll never burn as hot or as bright. (View Highlight)
But companies that are harvesting peat, for whom data has fewer clear applications, don’t have those margins. For them, emulating the practices of high-margin businesses—i.e., those that can afford inefficiencies in their data initiatives—is a trap (View Highlight)
Put differently, as enticing as the salesman’s offer is, his data wouldn’t materially change how you manage your business. Looking at monthly spreadsheets and periodically talking to customers is guidance enough. The omniscient dataset isn’t worth the cost. (View Highlight)
Focus on proven tooling and use cases—reporting, dare I say decision support—over moonshots (View Highlight)