Defining a data strategy for your team

Data is important - almost everyone knows that. However, developing a data strategy is not as easy as implementing it.

Our most recent event was about defining a data strategy for your team. From Sam’s talk, I’ve learnt 3 things myself that I’d like to share with our blog readers.

To watch the whole talk, you can scroll down to the bottom.

Lesson 1: align on objectives

We all know that when creating a plan you need to set up a goal, yet for different stakeholders and teams, it’s not uncommon for goals to be different and not unified. That’s why alignment plays a very important role when building your data strategy.

Through rounds of discussions with multiple stakeholders, you’ll get to know each other’s expectations and define common objectives. During this process, you will also have the opportunity to set up priorities (the most business critical metrics) and avoid vanity metrics (numbers that look good but do not serve a purpose).

Lesson 2: start with the question “What is success?”

We ask all of our clients this question: “What does success look like for your team”? Through their answer, you are able to not only understand their digital strategy, but also get the opportunity to dig deeper into the ways they measure success. We build that into what we call a measurement plan, which consists of success criteria.

A measurement plan sets clear expectations, and visualizes success for your business. An efficient way to build your plan requires these steps:

1. define business objectives
2. identify actions to achieve business objectives
3. define KPIs based on actions
4. have KPIs approved by key stakeholders
5. iterate and update KPIs regularly

Example: if the objective is to drive brand awareness through a website, key actions to drive brand awareness could be to increase number of new users of the website, while the KPI would be number of new users.

Another advantage of the measurement plan is that it forces you to reach an agreement with key stakeholders before the launch. This means it works as a reference when meeting obstacles or when anyone in the team has a new but not-too-relevant metric idea a while after the implementation is done, in that case, execute step 5 and put that new KPI in measurement plan 2.0.

Lesson 3: documentation is vital as a team resource

Documentation takes time, but what takes more of your time is when you don’t have any references for your teammates. Imagine being asked the same question by 3 different parties on the same day, or even one person asking three times in one week (yes, that will happen!). You’ll appreciate your forward thinking by documenting all necessary information in an accessible, easy to find place.

In the data talk, Sam recommends us to visualize the implementation. By doing so, it becomes easy to understand the implementation without having to be walked through it. You can do this by mapping out your product designs with which user actions need to be tracked, screen names, and trigger actions.

You can download the slides here

We will have more data-focused events in 2019, including both meetups and workshops. Follow us on WeChat and get the latest updates as we announce them!