When Numbers Help
This post written by Eric Peden, Director of Operations and Analytics
The startup world is governed by numbers. While the qualitative pieces of an individual startup can be interesting and unique to each business, ultimately, familiar metrics like traffic, revenue, and burn rate decide success or failure.
Given this black-and-white reality, I’m often fascinated by the interplay between the quantitative and the qualitative within a startup. One nice thing about numbers is that they can be deconstructed into their component parts: Identify the key variables, think qualitatively about why the variables are underperforming, then experiment, analyze, improve, and repeat. Each step is an alchemist mixture of arithmetic and the accumulated knowledge and experience of the decision maker.
I spend a lot of time with numbers, and it’s important for me to remember their limitations:
- Data doesn’t predict the future. Forecasting and understanding probabilities, yes. But probability isn’t certainty.
- Data helps with answers, but it doesn’t always ask the right question.
- Data doesn’t replace the customer. We can track and parse customer behavior, but customer experience is much more than a dataset.
