Consumer Insights is not my first career. I’ve lived five completely different professional lives so far; their connections aren’t obvious at first but they do, indeed, build upon the foundations of the prior.
I started in software development, going back to…well, kindergarten. I learned game programming from studying sample programs in the many monthly magazines that were a hallmark of the 8-bit computing community. That led to “professional” computer science training, then commercial software development, then the third circle of program management hell, several years as an industry analyst (my first brush with “insights”), business intelligence, and finally where I sit today as a client-side research practitioner.
With this history, it shouldn’t be surprising when I talk about the value of analytics and good data; I have seen businesses both thrive and collapse because of strong or weak analysts. Software engineers generally subscribe to the notion of “the mythical man-month“: that the science and art of creating software does not linearly scale with the addition or removal of developers. Worse still, your best engineer will be 10x as effective as your worst.
The same is true of analysts, in my experience. Adding another analyst doesn’t guarantee a proportional return on investment. The best analysts seem to intuitively know where to start hunting, how to slice data in interesting ways, how to visually present data in easy-to-understand formats, and how to design the data capture process from the beginning to yield the most valuable results. Your worst analysts need to be taught all of these skills.
Even with equal amounts of training and experience, however, two analysts can still have very different levels of effectiveness. There are two major differences between your analyst assassins and your data soldiers:
- Assassins enjoy the hunt. They thrive on it. They would rather experiment with a new tool or methodology than pull some off-the-shelf models.
- Soldiers focus on following the rulebook and executing projects as efficiently as possible…within established analytics constructs.
Every month this year, I have had multiple companies contact me looking for referrals for assassins but on a soldier budget. Both profiles have important roles to fill. Sometimes, you just need to run that tracking study again and do it faster/better/cheaper. Sometimes you are in uncharted waters. Never send a soldier on a Navy SEAL mission, and never ask an assassin to shoot fish in a barrel.
