Large amounts of data, without a narrative, can be unhelpful and even dangerous for business leaders. While leading change at innovative companies like Amazon, Booking.com, and NuBank, I have witnessed firsthand how data often fails to inspire decisive action and instead ends up overwhelming.
It can be tempting to think the issue resides in the data itself or its presentation, but the truth is often much more fundamental. Data, without context, is difficult to understand and challenging to generate urgency around. However, human evolution has equipped us with a highly effective means of disseminating data that has proven to motivate action: storytelling.
Storytelling through data has the power to drive meaningful change. Narratives not only captivate stakeholders but also empower quick decision-making that moves teams closer to reaching key goals. Leveraging data in this way must be deeply rooted in how people share information in a company’s culture.
Unlocking data-driven insights in an integrated and precise way starts with these four core principles.
1. Align On Business Priorities
While being able to access the data we need at any time is revolutionary for the modern entrepreneur, tracking too many metrics will provide little clarity and can cloud your strategy. If you’re feeling overwhelmed, you are probably looking at too much data. Leaders need to align on business priorities to choose what data is most important to collect and use to drive improvement. They must use any additional data to understand the problems and pick the top priorities. Without that data, you are guessing. So, how do you collect only enough data to prioritize ruthlessly? What’s the “MVP” set of insights? In all my roles, identifying key priorities by incrementally analyzing where we are working—and, sometimes more importantly, not working—has always been the first step to getting aligned toward meaningful action. At Nubank, I leveraged tools like UpLevel and CloudZero to pull data from existing tools that used machine learning to transform it into engineering metrics and actionable insights. As a result, we could visualize and drill down to inspect organizational allocation, performance, and the engineering story while focusing on the efficiency of cloud costs based on what we built for customers.2. Cut To The Chase Of Complex Strategies
Early on at Amazon, Jeff Bezos banned PowerPoints because he thought they were designed to persuade, to get people to feel a certain way rather than think deeply about a problem. As a result, Amazon pioneered the “six-pager” format, which I have used many times to distill complex strategies and objectives into a clear and concise narrative. The result? The whole organization gets aligned around one mission with a set of strategic goals to work toward. By pinpointing your organization’s top priorities, you focus efforts and resources on impactful initiatives, uniting teams under a clear shared mission. Amazon’s long-form narratives exemplify this, fostering critical thought and alignment through explicit goals and strategy debates.3. Use Narratives To Share Insights
Raw data does little to inspire action even in the most engaged teams, and the meaning behind numbers is often lost on stakeholders who are not involved in the day to day. Utilizing storytelling techniques is a highly effective way to convey insights to people at all levels in your organization, putting data in the context of where you were, where you are, and where you need to be. When I worked at NuBank, the team excelled at using narratives, regularly incorporating anecdotes and testimonials from executives and customers to add depth and context to data-rich presentations. By showcasing these qualitative insights alongside quantitative data, the information immediately becomes more relatable, meaningful, and actionable. You can make data more intuitive by:- transforming raw data into narratives built around contexts your stakeholders care about, whether that’s UX performance or customer retention.
- integrating quotes, anecdotes, and real-life examples to humanize the information, making it more relatable and compelling.
- focusing on the most actionable insights to avoid overwhelm and foster a deeper understanding of the information.
4. Create A Data-rich Feedback Loop
When narratives make data more accessible and engaging, a continuous feedback loop opens up, allowing stakeholders to speak on current priorities, upcoming decisions, and the latest outcomes. This information makes it easier to know which metrics are worth tracking and presenting on any given day, keeping data narratives ultra-relevant and impactful. At Amazon, we had weekly team meetings, all-hands monthly meetings, and frequent business reviews that empowered stakeholders to assess progress, identify product or engineering challenges, and course correct. These meetings were mandatory for team leads, and I always expected them to report on their metrics. This iterative cycle built transparency and accountability, and communication provided cultural reinforcement opportunities as Amazon worked to build a fail-fast, innovative environment. You can create and inform feedback loops with mechanisms like:- scheduling routine reviews to assess team-level progress, identify bottlenecks, and align on strategic priorities.
- establishing clear communication channels, both internally and externally, to discuss challenges, blockers, and fresh ideas.
- building a blameless culture that encourages teams to embrace feedback, learn from failures, and pivot strategies quickly.