So What? Identifying Insight And Impact From Discovery

This is part 5 of our six part series exploring the 7 deadly sins of product discovery where we delve into creating insight and impact from discovery. If you haven’t yet, check out part 4 of the series – My Data Is Better Than Your Data: Avoiding Bias In Discovery for a discussion on decreasing bias in discovery data.

The ultimate goal of discovery is insight: a deeper understanding of our customers and the problem space we operate in (market, competitors etc) in order to drive commercial (or other) advantage and decrease risk for the business. It can be tempting to assume that everything we find in discovery data is insightful, but this can lead us to ‘revelations’ that fall flat.

Not every finding in discovery is insightful and not every insight is impactful to the business. For us to provide high quality, robust and valuable discovery, we must first understand the difference between data, findings, insight and impact.

Data Is Not Insight

One of the biggest confusions in discovery is that between data and insight. Data is not insight. In fact even when it is analysed into research ‘findings’, it is still not insight. By not understanding the simple difference between data, findings and insights we could inadvertently be decreasing confidence in our discovery practice. So what’s the difference?

• Data: is research observations appropriately captured, cleansed and catalogued. e.g., “customer {a} said {y}”
• Findings: are data which is analysed and presented for meaningful patterns, commonalities or differences etc. e.g., “60% of customers say {y}”
• Insight: findings interpreted within the context of the business to identify actionable opportunities / risks. e.g., “addressing {y} with strategy {z} will likely generate ${x} in incremental revenue”

The trouble is that most discovery only ever uncovers findings and may never take the extra step to turn this into business insight. Without this contextualisation, findings may be irrelevant, hard to understand within the bounds of business goals or mis-aligned to strategy all together. While the findings may be intellectually interesting, it is unlikely they will spark the necessary thinking and conversations within the business that is generated by true insight.

Moreover, there is another layer – impact. Impact is generated when insights are utilised in the business to change behaviour, process, direction or strategy. This is the ultimate value of discovery – to change the decisions we make and the way we do business. What spurs this change is an impactful insight, which needs to be:

• Insightful: relevant and contextualised within the business (i.e., be an actual insight)
• Actionable: point towards a meaningful change to be made to do things differently
• Beneficial: clearly show the benefits to this change

Findings (or data) by themselves rarely sponsor change, they need deeper contextualisation. Even some insights may not be actionable by the business – either because it is not the right time to make a change or because investment in the change cannot be made yet. It is one thing to find valuable insights that cannot be actioned just yet, and quite another to find nothing of value in discovery.

When discovery frequently does not find anything insightful or actionable, it starts to decrease confidence in its value. If discovery findings are regularly met with “we already knew this” or “so what?”- this means discovery is not hitting the mark and providing the insight that the business needs to justify the time and expense. So then, how do we go beyond findings to identify impactful insights?

Identifying Impactful Insights

Creating insight from findings requires contextualisation within the business. This usually means combining findings with proprietary knowledge of how the business operates and what their specific goals are. There are a few places to look for this business context:

• Business strategy: the overall direction and goals of the business going into the future should align to insights. In this case the insight usually pertains to how the business can achieve the strategy / goals or risks posed to achievement.
• Business Operations: how the business operates and delivers value to the customer base could also be the basis of discovery insight. In this case insight may pertain to generating higher productivity value delivery or additional value streams that could be delivered within current business operations.
• Finance / Commercials: how the business makes money (or how much money it makes) may be impacted by discovery insights. In this case insights may reveal new opportunities to achieve financial goals or identify new commercial avenues to pursue (new products, partnerships etc).

Keeping across all of these areas is essential for effective product management, not just discovery. It is impossible for a product manager to make the right decisions for a product without this business context. With just a bit of contextual digging, you can move from discovery findings to true discovery insights contextualised within the business. This may involve:

• Connect multiple discovery findings together to support an insight
• Giving less attention to some, less relevant, findings or outliers (we discuss this more in our next article)
• Adding further weight to insights with business analytics or financial modelling – this point in particular can go a long way to identifying benefits to the business.

In order to make an insight actionable, there also needs to be a suggested change that is achievable within the business context. This means the change needs to be aligned to strategic direction and usually fit within any constraints of the business – e.g., budgets, operations etc. While it is okay for an insight not to be actionable right at this moment (e.g., it requires budgeting / planning), if this is all discovery ever finds (sometimes called ‘blue sky’ research) it might be that your business objectives are not targeted at the right level to be actionable (see article 3 of the series for a discussion on business objectives).

The ultimate goal of discovery should be insight and, ideally, impactful insight. By avoiding some common misconceptions around data, findings and insight, and by building business context into your discovery practice, it is possible to build higher business confidence in product discovery and drive change in the business. But one step is still left.

Once we have found impactful insights, how do we communicate them in a way that makes the business stand-up and listen? Moreover, how do we avoid the deadly sin that often plagues discovery communication: data babble. This is what we will discuss in the final part of our series.