#204 Driving Towards Data Driven - How to Add More Data to Your Org's Decisions - Interview w/ Stephen Galsworthy

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Stephen's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/galsworthy/

In this episode, Scott interviewed Stephen Galsworthy, former Head of Data at TomTom. Obviously, given he's no longer with the company, he was only representing his own views.

Some key takeaways/thoughts from Stephen's point of view:

1. Just because the products you sell are made from data, that doesn't mean you necessarily have a good process for leveraging data to make your products better. You need to embed information collection into how you create products, how customers interact with your offerings.
2. The AI Flywheel: If you can get good information on product user experience, you can feed that into AI systems that generate incremental insights to improve your user experience even more. Hopefully, that generates more users which generate even more information to improve even further.
3. If data collection on usage is not part of your business model - for a number of reasons - it can be hard to convince customers and/or partners to enable that data collection. Even if it's simply to improve the user experience. Try to add it in to your product development as early as possible.
4. If your organization is data hesitant, look for existing success stories from data. Look for something that couldn't have happened without the data. And then share that success internally to drum up more interest.
5. ?Controversial?: Data should rarely be THE deciding factor. Data should be a touch point that can strongly inform or give clarity. Use it for giving clarity or measuring as you iterate. Help execs understand it's not magic and that it's not all right or wrong.
6. It's easy to trust data when it confirms your...