Are you making data-informed decisions, and how?

Being an analytics/visitor behavior company (I work at Lucky Orange), we rely on data daily. We set our objectives and KPIs, and we combine analytic data with visitor behavior to drive our decisions. For example, let's say we launch a new version of a landing page, and initial data shows lower sign-ups than we expected. With that data in hand, we then take it to Lucky Orange to diagnosis why. We could be looking at heatmaps to analyze the CTA placement or watch session recordings to see people navigating through the site. We're looking at where they're clicking or not clicking. Is the CTA too low? Is the video too high? Do the links look like links?

I always speak to customers, but the process is quite complex and time consuming so I opted to minimise the time spent reaching out and interacting customers which resulted in a stagnant product. In my personal time I decided to build a qualitative research tool to help PMs such as myself to rapidly conduct comprehensive customer research without inconveniencing them or their customers. I need to speak to more PMs to understand their challenges doing qualitative research. These findings will help me refine the tool so PMs find validating product assumptions (with customers) so convenient they do it all time. would you be willing engage in a 30+ chat about your experience do qualitative research?

My experience here is a bit unique, but yes we're trying, and no it isn't great—for a key reason: I'm not marketing or trying to optimize the CRO of a SaaS product, widget or service. You see, I'm trying to market a book. Not a book of tips on how to do anything tech-creative related (which would be far easier) but a fiction book, in an oversaturated market, one with a genre gap: Adult LGBT+ sci-fi. Indie author tools are horrible in comparison to what's available for Startups, because y'all are the ones inventing your own solutions. None of the data points talk to each other saliently save Mailchimp. Web eComm does not talk to Amazon—the single best place to get your ebooks out there—and Amazon has the least transparent backend for data analysis possible. There's no higher-level anything. No demographics data. No referral traffic info. It's all guessing games. I say this to hopefully signal flare to literally any Maker on the face of the planet that self published authors need a different toolkit. Wish there was another option, because data-first is the way to go, but when everything we have is obtuse or spaghetti code, yeah. It's borderline impossible. If anyone here has any stacks that make sense here, let me know. Otherwise, I'm going to have to lowkey make something that bridges info. Not trying to complain, just trying to raise that Startup spaces embrace data, indie author B2C stuff...does not. And it lowkey stinks.

Always! Data-driven decisions are crucial to the success of every business, whether it's email campaigns, product usage, marketing efforts, looking for answers in the data, and A/B testing can really improve the effectiveness of your decisions.

Look at your objectives and prioritize. Find and present relevant data. Draw conclusions from that data. Plan your strategy. Measure success and repeat.