"Let me begin by describing a fairly typical meeting from one of my consulting clients, a large company. Senior management had gathered to make decisions about what to include in the next version of its product. As part of the company’s commitment to being data-driven, it had tried to conduct an experiment on pricing. The first part of the meeting was taken up with interpreting the data from the experiment.
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One problem was that nobody could agree on what the data meant. Many custom reports had been created for the meeting; the data warehouse team was at the meeting too. The more they were asked to explain the details of each row on the spreadsheet, the more evident it became that nobody understood how those numbers had been derived.
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Listening in, I assumed this would be the end of the meeting. With no agreed-on facts to help make the decision, I thought nobody would have any basis for making the case for a particular action. I was wrong. Each department simply took whatever interpretation of the data supported its position best and started advocating on its own behalf. Other departments would chime in with alternative interpretations that supported their positions, and so on. In the end, decisions were not made based on data. Instead, the executive running the meeting was forced to base decisions on the most plausible-sounding arguments.
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It seemed wasteful to me how much of the meeting had been spent debating the data because, in the end, the arguments that carried the day could have been made right at the start. It was as if each advocate sensed that he or she was about to be ambushed; if another team managed to bring clarity to the situation, it might undermine that person, and so the rational response was to obfuscate as much as possible. What a waste."
Trechos retirados de "The Lean Startup" de Eric Ries.
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