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TRICIA WANG: At Sudden Compass, we've
developed our own practice to help companies use data.
It came out of a need that we saw within organizations, which
is that we saw companies investing tons of money
in data and big data and technology analytics
and dashboards, and they were expecting
that it would all of a sudden magically
make their teams more customer-centric and more
innovative.
And this was all in the name of, let's be more innovative,
let's move faster, let's make better decisions.
But what we saw was this total paradox, which
is that the more companies invested in big data
technologies like analytics and dashboards,
the less they actually understood about the customer.
So what this practice involves, practically speaking,
is it allows a cross-functional team of people who may not
be data scientists to actually come together in a truly
cross-functional way to gain data literacy for the kinds
of data they're not used to.
When we say data, we actually believe
it's important that it's encompassing
a diversity of data sets, from qualitative to quantitative.
And so what this practice enables
is that it says anyone can come together-- literally anyone
in the organization can come together in an easy way
to do a sprint on how do you understand the customer better.
And what it does is it forces everyone
to actually have some touchpoint with a customer.
Inside organizations now, for some reason,
the people who talk to the customer the most
are the people who are lowest on the organizational rung.
And we really wanted to disrupt that because we believe
that in order to build new digital businesses,
you have to have everyone have some kind of touchpoint
with the customer.
So the Unlock Sprint makes that super easy.
It means you don't have to have any data background
or special research background.
Anyone can come together.
And practically speaking, it's just four easy steps.
The first step is, are we asking the right business question,
and how do we translate that business question
to a human question?
The second step is, how do we go acquire the data
to go answer that question?
So it could be qualitative or quantitative
depending on what sprint you're in, right?
And then, how do we analyze that data?
And the fourth, most important part
is, how do we act upon what we learned?
So what the Unlock Sprint does is
it operationalizes three things that we believe
are critical for companies to do to become
more customer-centric.
The first is that it operationalizes
the difference between discovery and optimization.
And the reason why this is important
is that oftentimes, companies are asking really
big discovery questions like, how do we
enter into this new market, or how do we acquire
these new sets of customers?
But the way they go about answering
that big discovery-level question
is through optimization-level methods,
like doing A/B testing or focus groups.
So they're using the wrong methods for the wrong questions
at the wrong time.
The second point that the practice operationalizes
is that it integrates qualitative and quantitative
data.
So this is incredibly important because what
we've seen in organizations for the push to be more data-driven
is that they've ended up deprioritizing and devaluing
qualitative data, any of that human input.
And we believe it is critical, it
is imperative to integrate the qualitative
to make the quantitative data useful.
Because quantitative data is amazing.
It gives you scale, it leverages machine intelligence,
it can tell you a lot of what.
But the minute you want to know, like,
why does that statistic say this,
why are these numbers showing up,
you have to go back to the qualitative data-- which
we call thick data.
We rebranded qualitative data thick data
to make big data sound just as sexy
to data scientists and engineers who
may deprioritize qualitative data
and call that, like, small or useless data.
The third thing that our practice operationalizes
is that it brings decision makers closer to the customer.
Our co-founder Matt LeMay, who's written about this in his book,
"Agile for Everybody--" and we implement agile
in organizations-- is that the people
who are closest to the customer are
the ones who are most junior.
And the people who are making decisions
that affect the customer the most
are the people sitting at the top.
And so this is something that Matt
has talked about a lot in his book,
and this is why our practice really enforces and creates
this environment where everybody can get close to the customer
in an experimental, low-risk, easy, fast way.
It doesn't take months.
It could just take literally a lunch.
You can run your sprint within two hours.
So for the first time ever, we are
open sourcing some of our materials,
such as our integrated data thinking framework that
unifies qualitative and quantitative methodology
into a question-led process.
And we are putting up our materials on the Google Design
Sprint site.
We believe that we will all do better
if we can create a movement.
And the movement is to figure out
how do we empower humans in a data-driven world.
And if we can all do that together,
then I think it will make all of our work better and stronger.
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