Michael Kaminsky explains how analysts can turn uncertain data into actionable recommendations by separating the uncertainty from the call itself. Borrow risk-assessment techniques from finance to quantify the uncertainty, then blend the data with your company's strategic priorities. What success looks like matters: the same data leads to different decisions depending on whether you're optimizing for cost or growth.
Chapters
In my experience, at least, executives are often very frustrated when someone else is bringing data and what to do about it is unclear. But acknowledging risk or acknowledging uncertainty in the data itself is totally fine. We can be uncertain about the data and we could say like, look, the data isn't sufficient to answer this question with 100% certainty. That's totally fine. But then your job is to separate that out from your communication of a recommendation. You can take into account the uncertainty when it comes to actually making a decision or making a recommendation about what to do. Finance teams are really good at thinking about risk and understanding risk, right? That's a core part of finance training. And so you can always bring the idea of risk into these conversations and uncertainty into these conversations. They're going to get that, but you still have to, at the end of the day, make a decision. And that's the point where you have to like combine what the data say, which may be uncertain. With like business strategy and other considerations, and that's what actually yields the decision.
I think part of that is this quantification of what does it mean if this is successful? What does it mean if we get this much? Does that open the door to a next level of something? And so there are just business implications that go beyond what you will see in the test results that you want to incorporate in there as well. Sometimes it is a lot more straightforward, but sometimes there are bigger strategic things that build on top of it. And then like I say, if you are at a point at the company where, saving money is much more important than growing, then the decision that you make will be different with exactly the same results. And so, so that needs to influence, kind of advise your decision-making.
