5 ways to become more insights-driven

A few weeks ago I was invited by a friend to talk to her class of future CX Specialists at IHM Business School about how I’ve managed to get my teams to become more insights driven and what is required from a Product Manager to achieve this. Below I’ve put together some of the pointers I shared with the class and advice which I believe is useful for anyone who aspires to become a successful Product Manager.

Photo by Rohan Makhecha on Unsplash

📦 Start delivering on what you’ve promised

A discussion we continuously have at SeventyOne Consulting is how many Product Managers disregard the fact that being able to have highly autonomous product teams start with creating trust to stakeholders through continuous deliveries. It’s common to hear PM:s complain about the fact that Product Discovery is being disregarded by management but when you ask them what they’ve delivered over the past year or so, the answer is often “not much”. Don’t expect your managers to praise Product Discovery if you don’t deliver on agreed upon deadlines.

👀 If you have data and insights - share them!

As a Product Manager, one of the best ways to get stakeholders thinking you’ve got everything under control is by sharing data and insights with them. The counter to that I often hear is “We don’t have customer-facing products or services”. I’m not talking about conversion rates, churn or other metrics that you typically have access to as customer-facing teams. It can be as simple as the number of users, time spent using a service or load times. Find metrics that are available to you and share them in whatever communication channels you have at your company. This will inevitably create the sense that you have “things under control” which you then can use to create an even more autonomous team.

🎯 Clear outcomes beat output any day of the week

The foundation created by achieving the first two pointers will at least give you a slightly better chance of achieving this but being outcome-driven requires quite a bit from the Product Manager and your team. It will force you to think deeply about the value you’re aiming for and in the process you will for sure discuss which metrics and insights you need to have in order to measure the desired outcomes. This is of course quite the undertaking, especially if you’ve historically been an output-based team and it becomes even more challenging since being outcome-driven is not an excuse to stop delivering new features and on the deadlines you’ve committed to.

🗣️ Use the right language when communicating

Something I often see is colleagues who are unable to adapt their communication to different parts of a company. Depending on the setup and size of your company you’ll find yourself interacting with various roles and people with wildly different agendas. Don’t be the Product Manager who throws around agile lingo when talking to Customer Service or Compliance. Instead, try to adapt your messaging and in the process, you’ll find yourself being able to build trust with your stakeholders. You might ask yourself how this has anything to do with being insights-driven. Well like I’ve said before, by creating trust among your stakeholders you give yourself a better chance of being more autonomous in your decision-making. This can then be used to prioritize Product Discovery and allow your team to collectively become more customer-centric.

⚔️ Pick your battles

If you’ve taken the steps above you’re probably in a pretty good position and your team is pretty close to being insights-driven. But there will always be critical projects where your stakeholders care very little if the process is customer-centric or not. They simply want to hear that you’ll deliver on the agreed-upon deadline and nothing more. Don’t be the Product Manager who always preaches doing things by the book and instead go back to my first point. Do your best to deliver on time and tell your team about how this will end up helping all of you in the long-term.

There are many ways to become a more insight-driven Product Manager but mastering what many people would call basics, is a great starting point. Trust and transparency are qualities that get you a long way and enable you to build a platform on which you can achieve great things.