The importance of insights

Congratulations! You just launched an amazing product or feature for your users! You get congratulatory messages and a big bonus next spring. But, what did you learn? What did your team and the organization learn? Learning and developing insights is extremely important for a variety of reasons but is often neglected in organizations. Let me explain why gathering and sharing insights could be extremely powerful:

• Often, you will run experiments and fail but if you learn and not just learn anything, but learn and form strong hypotheses after thorough research, you are more likely to come back and succeed
• Learning will put you ahead of the market and competition. You are then not just catching up to user trends but you are influencing and defining the next set of products and services for the market
• Your organization becomes stronger when you learn more. If you put that collective knowledge together, you can experiment more and are more likely to be successful

But what does learning and developing insights even mean?

Let's say you had a problem x and you developed a solution y to fix this problem and tested it with your users. And boom, they started using your product more! Does this mean y is amazing and successful? Should we expand y to all users? Well, the answer is in the details. You need to develop a clear view of what happened - did users engage with y and how much, did some users love it and others did not, or did something else happen we cannot clearly explain? Insights should capture a deeper understanding of user behavior and trends that we can leverage to develop new products or services. They should not stop at reporting operational and business metrics but go above and beyond that. An example insight could be "customers find recommendations very useful when they are searching for home decor" or "substituting dairy products does not work for most grocery shoppers".

All of this requires hard work and is often not straight forward for many reasons:

• Organizations are often not set up with the right infrastructure so anyone and everyone can access data anytime. And insights take more time and depth to gather and evaluate
• PMs and Analysts often have overlapping responsibilities, though I believe PMs should be held accountable for gathering insights
• You might be running too many tests and not giving yourself enough time to learn from each. If you are, take a deep breadth and evaluate if this is what makes sense for your team or organization. Often, learning and developing insights can be way more valuable than simply launching useful features. But it depends on your situation and context.

Experimentation is a powerful way to develop, test, and launch products and services but learning and developing insights is equally important (full stop)