Imagine living with items of invaluable wealth and having the misfortune of not understanding their value or even the ways of extracting value from them.
Data is the oil of the new age, and mining requires new-age solutions and expertise.
Even before we get into making fortunes from the data, let us ask ourselves one question first -
Do we even know our data and what it represents?
Even though the question seems broad and somewhat daunting to answer in a few lines, most companies that run successful products & services work very closely with their data and derive a definite identity for their products and customers from it.
The Secret to a Successful Business is Data
For a business to succeed, it must continuously innovate and provide value to its clients and customers. Not to mention it should work efficiently to utilize the resources and keep the costs in check.
A successful business understands its product, its users, and everything in between. This can only be achieved by collecting information & knowing ways to use that information for the noble purpose of growing the business.
Let’s take an example of a simple app and how it can be successful and continue to grow.
In this charming example, we have a note-taking app that provides a feature for its users to take notes efficiently. The problem for this firm is to monetize and provide consistent value to drive growth.
What does it mean to work with data?
Few steps we can see right away that can help them get started with this challenge -
- Data Collection - The Product team will need to understand the type of data they will need to collect to make measurable and informed decisions regarding the features. They will need to collect data on User Behavior, User Interaction, and probable usage patterns to better understand their user base. Additionally, the team might run experiments with beta features and pricing to gain more valuable data for more insights.
- Data Cleaning & Analysis - All the data that is collected will need to be cleaned to make sense and stored in a way that is easy to analyze and share with different departments within the organization. The Analytics team will create valuable insights from this data by running predictive analysis, sentiment analysis, and/or helping to provide in-app recommendations to their users.
- Data-driven decision-making - The team of Data Analysts & Data Scientists make sure that the data is not only managed well and analyzed but also presented in a form that makes sense to the stakeholders & is business-ready. The Data Team makes sure the visualizations are available for clarity and a better understanding of data from a business perspective.
- AI-Ready - The Product team will have to deal with the surge in interest for features related to AI and also to be on par with the competitors. Huge amounts of clean data are needed to train models for specific purposes that are niche to the product which the team is trying to improve.
Let us look at the feature List of a note-taking app -
Based on the above approach, the product team might come up with numerous high-value features that can drive growth in user acquisition, and subscriptions and provide an edge over the competitors.
The product team will want to improve existing features like -
- Quick Note-Taking
- Natural Language Processing for handwritten notes
- AI Summary for long-form notes
- Community-driven template creation
The success of these features depends on defining key metrics and gathering even more data to support the metrics and feedback from users to further the improvements.
A large enterprise will have a dedicated analytics team to support the product team with such data to refine their metrics. A small to medium enterprise might not have such luxury.
Enabling Small & Medium sized Businesses to be Data-Driven
The typical composition of a small team is implementation-heavy with a sprinkle of all-rounders in the Product Management Department who tend to handle everything that won’t be catered to by the implementation team.
Take the above notes app for an example in this case, Do you think they will have a fleet of Product Managers, Data Engineers, and Developers to support every aspect of the product? Or Do you think they will partner with other external experts to rely on such services?
A small product team looking to provide high-value products to customers at a rapid pace hugely relies on a team of externals who have expertise in a multitude of services needed by the team.
In the above example, our product team working with the notes app will require experts who can work with different aspects of data and provide them with valuable insights to implement the new line of features to be released to the customers.
The importance of having a trusted execution partner
For a small business to flourish they need to be agile and it can be daunting to move quickly with a bloated organizational structure. This is where having trusting partners makes a lot of difference.
Finding an expert to not only accomplish the work at hand but to be a trusting partner for long-term business success can be a long and arduous process of trial and error.
Some major players providing these expert services have been in the market for a long time. Players like -
- Deloitte
- Accenture
- McKinsey
charge a fortune to let you know the things the executives in the organizations already know and then outsource the execution to their partners to get things done.
The question remains though about the identity of these experts that partner with small and medium businesses. What is their real identity?
Small & Medium sized businesses need experts who can not only consult but also partner with them to see the solutions to the realizations.
In our example above, the experts could be someone who can do End-to-End work with data and help the product team shape the notes app and in turn build a strategy to grow their business. The team needs something called Data Consultants to work with the existing data, help collect new data, and contribute to shaping the organization to be more data-driven with their decisions.
What is Etherion Consulting & can they help with Data Consultancy?
Let us go back to the notes app, shall we?
For all the challenges the product team was facing and the need to work with extended use of data-related activities, it is obvious as we derived that they needed a data consultancy to fulfill their requirements.
In this case, Etherion will be the ideal partner to work with the product team to -
- understand the goals and objectives
- work on the data cleanup and analysis
- work with the business to make sense of the data
- and finally help the product team define the product features, roadmap, and metrics to track the progress.
As we discussed earlier, the big players in the market provide consultation and charge a fortune for it. After the consultation, the product team building the above notes app will still need resources to execute the plan based on the findings of the consultation.
Etherion, not only partners with the organizations on the consulting part of the business but also on the execution part. Etherion partners with the organizations on their journey from building strategy to refining it with data through to project implementation and release as execution partners helping with project management aspects to align the organizations’ goals and objectives with those of the implementation teams.
Conclusion
Data is and will continue to be an integral part of an organization’s success. As the organizations strive to be more agile and deliver value iteratively at a rapid pace, their organizations need to partner with different experts at different stages of their product and organization success.
Etherion is and will be the trusted partner that helps organizations drive success and continued growth with efficient programs and data consultancy.
Have a look at our services page and let’s discuss how Etherion can help you drive your product and organizations’ growth to the next level.