Winning with Data: Transform Your Culture, Empower Your People, and Shape the Future

TRANSFORM YOUR COMPANY′S CULTURE TO CREATE COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE

Winning with Data is the authoritative guide to revolutionizing your team′s and company′s culture to wield data to gain a superior competitive edge over your competition. Until now, organizations have had very little dependable guidance for analyzing data to develop sustainable competitive advantage. This practical guide shares the techniques, tools and tactics used by some of the most disruptive companies in the world, and explains the methods to replicate these patterns. Leading experts in big data, business intelligence, and business strategy Tomasz Tunguz and Frank Bien demonstrate leveraging the full power of data requires more than good infrastructure it demands a universal lexicon, agreements between teams, ongoing education and infusing meetings with data.

This complete resource illustrates how to efficiently instrument a company to collect and analyze the wealth of data available, including:

Developing the right metrics to collaborate effectively across teams Structuring experiments and conversations with data effectively along with tips for avoiding common data biases that lead teams to the wrong conclusion Educating your team and company on the most effective mechanisms for answering key business questions Sharing and presenting analyses and conclusions to reach the best decision

The incisive case studies from some of the most disruptive companies in the world inform how other companies can transform their cultures to invent and develop their own competitive advantages. Start turning information into competitive advantage today with Winning with Data.

Introduction ix

Chapter 1 Mad Men to Math Men: The Power of the Data–Driven Culture 1

Operationalizing Data: Uber s Competitive Weapon 2

The Era of Instant Data: You Better Get Yourself Together 4

Data Supply Chains: Buckling Under the Load 6

Management by Opinion: The Illusion of Knowledge 8

Our Vantage Points 10

Chapter 2 Four Problems with Data Today: Breadlines, Obscurity, Fragmentation, and Brawls 15

Data Breadlines for the Data–Poor 15

Data Obscurity: The Failure of the Card Catalog 17

Rogue Databases and Analysts: The Data Fragmentation Problem 19

Data Brawls: When Miscommunication Devolves into Arguments 21

Chapter 3 Business Intelligence: How We Got Here 23

Business Intelligence Is Born: The First Query 23

Databases for the Masses: Oracle Commercializes Codd s Invention 24

Legacy BI: A Three–Layer Cake 26

Google s Answer to Huge Data: Vanilla Boxes 27

600 Petabytes per Day: HiPal at Facebook 30

Extreme Data Collection: The New Normal 32

Looker: Weaving the Data Fabric 33

Chapter 4 Achieving Data Enlightenment: Gathering Data in the Morning and Changing Your Business s Operations in the Afternoon 37

Not Just Another Person with an Opinion 37

Aligning Sales Teams in Real Time 48

Scaling Sales Teams with Data 50

Determining Customer Satisfaction at Every Point in the Buyer Journey 52

The Rosetta Stone: Developing a Shared Data Language 55

The One Equation That Defines the Business 57

Brutal Intellectual Honesty: Speaking Data to Power 60

Putting Pride in Its Place: How Data Transforms Cultures 66

Chapter 5 Five Steps to Creating a Data–Driven Company From Recruiting to Regression, It All Starts with Curiosity: Changing the Culture 71

It All Starts with Curiosity 71

Why You Should Stop Listening to Your Boss 72

How to Recruit Curious People 76

Chapter 6 From Hacks to Harmony: The Typical Progression of Data–Driven Companies 83

Step 1: Ask Your Friend, the Engineer 84

Step 2: Bastardize an Existing Solution 84

Step 3: Access Raw Data 85

The Crux of the Problem 85

Bring Your Own BI: The Five Letters That Will Change the Data World 86

The Power of a Unified Data–Modeling Layer 89

The Final Step: A Data Fabric 92

Chapter 7 Data Literacy and Empowerment: The Core Responsibilities of the Data Team 95

The Illusion of Validity: How to Avoid Data Biases 95

Correlation versus Causation 98

How Facebook and Zendesk Engender Data Literacy 100

Walking the Data Gemba: Training by Walking Around 104

Chapter 8 Deeper Analyses: Asking the Right Questions 109

When Data Confounds Our Intuition: How to Handle Ambiguity 112

Data Is Useless Unless You Can Act on It 115

Defining New Opportunities by Creating New Metrics That Matter 120

The Fastest Growing Media Site of All Time 122

How to Run a Data–Backed Experiment: Step by Step 124

Chapter 9 Changing the Way We Operate 129

Change Begins with a Story 129

Deliver Data with Panache: Structuring Presentations to Inspire 133

Chapter 10 Putting It All Together 141

Acknowledgments 145

Appendix: Revenue Metrics 147

Index 155

TOMASZ TUNGUZ is a venture capitalist at Redpoint and writes daily, data–driven blog posts about key topics for startups including fundraising, startup benchmarks, best practices, and team building.

FRANK BIEN is CEO of Looker, exploration and discovery business intelligence platform. He has built his career on nurturing strong corporate culture and highly efficient teams.