Performance & Design
Peter Bull is a pioneer of early mobile software applications that focus on business intelligence. He is currently the CTO of River Logic, an advanced analytic software company focused on Supply Chain Management.
When Bill Gates created the Microsoft Business Intelligence Group in the early 2000s, an elite team of SMEs (Subject Matter Experts) was assembled. Peter Bull was the top Corporate Performance Management SME of the Microsoft Business Intelligence Group.
“ Leadership people are looking for metrics they identify with.”
I think when you're dealing with organizations, particularly Senior levels of senior decision makers, people often get sort of intimidated, maybe, about how they surface up data in context for decision making.
The flip side of that is senior leaders typically have gained experience, have latched on to either formal or informal metrics that help them guide their decision making.
And you'll get situations where people will talk about their gut reaction or things like that. It's seldom that people are making decisions in complete lack of context. They've got some indicators that they use, and I think that's an important clue as we move forward, that lining up across an organization what those indicators are, you can call them metrics, with data bound areas are really the key focus you'll get.
But reality, is those leadership people are looking for key metrics that they identify with. And most importantly, and here's the clue to why they've arrived where they are, because they know they can rely on them, and they have varying levels of trust in them.
They've proven in the past to help them shape those decisions. So that's the clue in all of this, is lining up the right metrics in with the right relationships.
“ If you jump straight to the financials, you lose the plot.”
The fact that there is a disconnect, typically between lead and lag indicators, and particularly the lag indicators, which is where I've talked about the senior management placing their trust. So, things like revenue, profitability. I'm going to say boring financial indicators, the fundamentals there.
Whereas if you think about what design is fundamentally doing. They really should be one of the preeminent lead indicators. Because you’re designing for how customers are going to fundamentally interact with your product, your services, your brand.
It should give a very clear relationship into the ongoing operational aspects of the company and ultimately in the financials. And it seems the gap can appear too big.
“ Every other area has a plan, so it should be the same.”
So, alongside your design, there is the intent of the design. What is it you're expecting to bring to that customer journey, to the overall operational?
Is the intent that you want to reduce friction on customer acquisition and the cost of customer acquisition? Maybe balance that with some levels of churn, and pull that back to positive signal? Be able to grow your customer base, usage, utilization, all those things, and then overlay that with the sentiment of your customers?
And the benefits we have today compared to some time ago is that it's relatively easy now to collect very thorough customer-centric data, depending on how you’re delivering your product or service. But it's a poor excuse to say that we don't have the data. It's more important now what you do with the data, and how you treat that as well. But, to the key point upfront. You need a plan for how your design team and design operations are going to contribute. Every other area has a plan, so it should be the same.
