Data Driven Round the Bend

A client asked me today how he could become more “data-driven”, and applying a bit of Alan Weiss, I undermined the assumption: “Maybe you shouldn’t!”

Indeed, in many cases I see people drowning in data, trying to analyse tech team velocity or take the derivative of story points per millisecond or building incredibly complex pricing spreadsheets. They would do a lot better to examine some high-level results, take a nice walk in the forest, and think about what the information is telling them and how to get more.