How do you know that your organization is becoming more data fluent? You’ll see new behaviors such as the language people use, the things they focus on, and the way meetings are run. Data analysis and key performance measures are elevated from after-thought to starting-point.

Here are five behaviors that you should start to expect from your team as your data fluency matures:

Everyone Knows the Key Metrics — and Debates Them

Data fluent organizations have a common understanding of how progress is measured. People at all levels have become familiar with these metrics and think about how their work relates to these numbers.

At Juice, we have a North Star Metric (the unchanging measure of progress) and three “key drivers” that are the current bottlenecks or leverage-points for improving the North Star Metric. We encourage discussion about how to best measure and what the results imply.

Product Features or Investments Are Weighed Against Key Metrics

Data fluent organizations evaluate new investments by how they are likely to impact key performance metrics.

At Juice, our product roadmap is increasingly guided by our quantified understanding of user behaviors. We look for the most frequent blockers to success and consider new features as ways to knock down those walls.

Investment ROI calculator http://labs.juiceanalytics.com/valuation/index.html

Anecdotes Get Tested

We talk about data storytelling all the time. However, individual stories are often just a clue to a pattern — or simply a one-off outlier.

Does it happen often? What is the implication? Why did it occur?

At Juice, we’ve discovered all sorts of user behaviors in Juicebox that we had not anticipated. For example, our European users often load CSV (comma delimited files) that are delimited by semi-colons. We discovered this through one user’s story, but then validated the frequency through data.

via Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal https://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2159

Important Processes Get Focus Through Data Products

For each of the priorities in the organization, someone should create a data product that sheds light on the progress toward this goal. The data product may be a quarterly summary of results or a real-time dashboard of operations.

Is there an important element of what your organization does that is not transparent and could benefit from an effective data product?

One-off Analyses Bloom Everywhere

Data fluent organizations aren’t satisfied with tracking data. People want to get to The Why. They are hungry for data sources that will help them explain customer behaviors, operational issues, and marketing performance. They want to put key metric results into context: What is the goal? How does that compare to industry benchmarks?

At Juice, our focus on key metrics has spawned dozens of analyses to understand what it takes to get a new user to succeed with Juicebox.