How to land impactful product changes as an analyst
“Oh this is interesting, thanks for looking into this.” — words from your stakeholder when looking at your analysis before turning around and proceeding with business as usual. Sounds familiar? Here comes an analysis template to ensure that your analyses land actionable results that your stakeholders will want to act upon.
Disclaimer: I prefer using practical examples for illustrative purpose where possible in my articles. In this one I will refer to Spotify Audiobooks. All datapoints are made up.
Working on an analysis can be a long, tedious process. Finding the relevant data, bringing it into shape and extracting useful information before finally summarizing everything into a presentable format can take up to several weeks. The more work one puts into an analysis, the more frustrating it can be if the analysis does not lead to any business decisions.
For an analysis to be impactful, it does not only have to land in time so the decision at hand is not already made, but it has to include tangible, actionable insights with clear next steps and options that are easy for stakeholders to evaluate.
Actionable insights do not only provide a specific data point that might be interesting, but lay out a clear narrative how this insight is connected to the problem at hand, what the ramifications are, as well as possible options and next steps to take with the associated benefits/risks of (not) acting upon these.
Let’s look at an example, in this case for one of Spotify’s features Audiobooks:
Not Actionable: Users under the age of 25 hardly use audiobooks. → Is this good, bad? Should they be listening to audiobooks and is there anything we should do about it?Actionable: Users under the age of 25 hardly use audiobooks because they never explore the feature in the app. However users who listen to audiobooks have a 20% higher retention rate. → This information tells us that audiobooks represent a potential opportunity to increase retention amongst younger users, however there seems to be more work to be done to encourage users…
