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1/ Another musing on this: to be truly data-driven, I think, means to fundamentally believe that data reflects reality, and to treat it with according interest, curiosity, and humility.
2/ I've found that lots of people compile and cite lots of data (sometimes because it is a job requirement), but they aren't actually submitted to it. They don't ask it any questions because they don't think it provides real answers.
3/ The strange thing about this is the inescapability of data. Take your most basic metrics, like total revenue. That's a data point. Underneath it are many more data points, all of which reflect the realities that created that data point.
4/ For example: in e-commerce, the next metrics down from revenue are website sessions, conversion rate, and AOV. So the data-driven person starts asking those data points some questions, e.g. why is my conversion rate down?
5/ From there, she looks at the metrics underneath conversion rate: what % of my traffic is top of funnel? What's my sell-through rate on PDPs? And so on, until there is a diagnosis, which forms a solution hypothesis.
6/ She behaves this way because she believes that data reflects reality, and therefore finding the solutions to her revenue problem (itself a recognition that data reflects reality) can be found by submitting to the reality of the data, then asking that data good questions.
7/ The opposite approach is to cite the problem at the top level ("my revenue is down!") then immediately start bandying about solutions ("we need to have a sale" or "our website sucks" or "we need a better hook for new traffic" etc).
8/ Any of these solutions may in fact be right, but they often indicate a lack of commitment to really knowing what's happening and how you got where you are. Plus, they are necessarily subjective, and lead to fruitless meetings where stakeholders toss around unaimed solutions.
9/ Data-driven people have a reputation for arrogance in these settings but I find it's often the opposite: people have shocking confidence about solutions to problems w/o having dug into the data. Data-driven people can't process that, because they believe data reflects reality.
10/ It's hard to say all this without sounding arrogant even here. I get that. But so many of the most fruitless strategic discussions I have been in are fruitless precisely because team members aren't committed to working hard to understand the problem first.
