Becoming Data-Driven is Product Management

Sam Nordstrom, Product Manager at Intuit, shares how Intuit transformed into a more customer-centric company, and his approach to conducting quantitative research and making data-driven decisions.

Product managers make critical decisions about what products and features to build in order to achieve business goals. To do so effectively, product managers conduct qualitative and quantitative research to learn what their users want.

This week’s guest, Sam, faced a challenge obtaining the quantitative data that he needed in order to make his product better. At his company, Intuit, in-product analytics was owned by a central team that was responsible for providing insights to product teams. This made it difficult for Sam to get the insights he needed in a timely manner. So he learned how to work with the data on his own.

Sam shares how and why he analyzes the five key moments of his users’ journey:

• Discovery
• Engagement
• Conversion
• Retention
• Referral

He works to determine where users are dropping off in this journey and improve the user experience accordingly. The case studies Sam shares help illustrate his advice.

After using his quantitative research to make significant improvements to his progress, he worked to democratize data-driven decision-making across Intuit.

You’ll learn a lot from this episode about analytics, driving organizational change, and presenting data to executives.

Here are the highlights:

• How Intuit became more customer-centric and launched new products (3:05)
• How Sam incorporated quantitative research into Intuit’s approach (7:45)
• Sam’s approach to conducting quantitative research (13:15)
• How Sam democratized data-driven decision making across Intuit (16:45)
• Best practices for reporting quantitative research findings to executives (20:35)
• How data-driven decision helped Intuit build better products (27:45)