Building Products for the Enterprise

Chapter 6. Building Better Products with Data

Whether you’re in enterprise or consumer software, analyzing data to understand how people actually buy, implement, use, and retain your product is your best chance to build the right thing quickly.

In Chapter 7, we examine how customers do not always do exactly what they say they do. You might ask customers questions about their usage of your product, or the challenges they face in their respective industries, and at times they are likely to give answers which are (either intentionally or unintentionally) uninformed, biased, or just plain inaccurate.

We’ve discussed how observation is a good way to ensure that you are focused on what people actually do rather than simply their impressions or assumptions about what they do. The trouble with observation is that it does not scale very well. Even in enterprise software, where your user base is likely substantially smaller than highly successful consumer products, you might have hundreds of thousands or millions of users that you would like to observe. Watching a small group of users perform daily tasks can provide you with powerful, visual evidence of the strengths and weaknesses of your product, but unless you are watching at least several dozen users try to accomplish similar results, it is difficult to draw widespread conclusions from observation alone.

The missing link to help you understand broader trends among your users is data, which allows you to spot trends in your user base ...