During the times I worked as a product manager for different SaaS products, my product always had a module called “Insights”.
If you immediately thought of a fancy dashboard with sleek charts, you guessed right.
It was a big pet peeve of mine to see the word insight so blatantly misused. I was well aware of the fact that the dashboards in my SaaS products were data rich but insight poor.
On a rare occasion, one of our charts would identify a pattern for the first time, helping challenge or evolve the user’s current knowledge and beliefs. But 98% of the time, the dashboards delivered only information (data that had been processed, aggregated, organized, and displayed in a more human-friendly format).
Unsurprisingly, the adoption rate of the “Insights” module was invariably low.
The two classes of insight
Research psychologist Gary Klein has a definition for insight that’s much more useful than the ones we can find in dictionaries:
Insight: An unexpected shift in the way we understand things.
Gary Klein in Seeing What Others Don’t – The Remarkable Ways We Gain Insights
Expanding on his definition, I like to classify insights into two groups. A basic insight answers a question in a way that unexpectedly shifts how we understand something. An actionable insight, the most valuable kind, goes further, having the power to not only make us rethink something, but also push things in a new direction. Unfortunately, many dashboards are bad at the former, let alone the latter.
What a basic insight looks like
If I go to my Substack dashboard, I can see statistics like email open rate, number of subscribers, how many new visitors the newsletter had this week, etc.
I may have the intuition that the number of new visitors goes up on weeks when I publish a new article and down when I don’t. I just opened my dashboard and confirmed that understanding (i.e., no insight gained here).
I did glean an insight from visiting the dashboard though. Excluding email subscribers, I have the same amount of traffic arriving at my newsletter directly from opening datapoints.substack.com on a web browser as coming from LinkedIn. My first guess would be that the top source of traffic is LinkedIn, the only place where I alert non-subscribers when a new article is available here.
Substack statistics unexpectedly shifted my understanding of where traffic comes from. But there’s not much I can do with this insight, since I don’t know what causes visitors to come here directly through typing in the domain name or selecting a bookmark. This is an example of what I call a “basic insight”.
What an actionable insight looks like
Jerroyd Moore, web and mobile developer, wrote an article that serves to illustrate what the second category, “actionable insight”, looks like.
As happens with many businesses, Moore’s company was constantly struggling to make decisions when different groups expressed diverging opinions about the best course of action. Here’s one of various examples provided in his article:
Staff disagreed on the user experience of the website. Many believed customizing your software was too complicated for users to understand. They believed the users did not want to go through the customization process, and instead wanted to emphasize the ability to download all software packages (over six gigabytes). The discussion lasted for weeks and the arguments were being repeated in an echo chamber, without any data on the user’s behavior.
After implementing a monitoring tool based on Elastic Search (ES), Moore was able to end the endless discussion using evidence instead of opinions:
Collecting the data in ES, I demonstrated that 60% of users consistently customized their software, settling the discussion and keeping both options available to the user.
In this context, “60% of our users customize their software” is an actionable insight regardless of whether it’s presented via a fancy dashboard or simply stated verbally or through written words. Learning this fact allowed the team members who previously believed that users didn’t want to go through the customization process to rethink their opinion. Deploying the monitoring tool earlier and encouraging the team to look at the evidence could have avoided weeks of discussions and arguments about website design.
A real insight shakes our understanding of what is. The best kind is also actionable, allowing us to act on it or share it with an agent who can drive change.
Like I wrote in a previous article,
Contrary to what many vendors say, the best analytics tools are not the ones that present official-looking views into KPIs and let users ask questions and perform limitless data exploration. The best tools to drive action are the rare ones that deliver key insights through narration and visualization that answer a single question: What’s the story?
The next time a vendor tries to convince your company to purchase an analytics product they claim produces valuable insights, consider if it has the ability to provide unusual or expected findings that shed new light on a key subject area. If the answer is yes, does it prepare a pathway for action to occur, or is only capable of raising more questions than action?
Relevant, specific insights that encourage people to act can yield incredible returns for a business. The secret is to reset the meaning of the word “insight” so it’s no longer confused with more data, KPIs, or prettier interactive charts.