The Case for Analytics: Informed Teams Make Better Bets

Every product decision is a bet. Which feature ships first, which market gets the next card program, which onboarding step gets rebuilt — you are always wagering time and money on an outcome you can't fully see. The question is never whether you're betting. It's whether you're betting informed.

What the research actually says

In 2011, economists Erik Brynjolfsson, Lorin Hitt, and Heekyung Kim published “Strength in Numbers: How Does Data-Driven Decisionmaking Affect Firm Performance?” — one of the first large-scale studies to measure what being informed is actually worth. They surveyed the business practices and technology investments of 179 large publicly traded firms.

The result: firms that adopted data-driven decision-making showed output and productivity 5–6% higher than what their other investments would predict. The effect showed up again in asset utilization, return on equity, and market value. And because the authors used instrumental-variables methods, the evidence points to data causing performance — not successful firms simply buying more dashboards.

Five percent may sound modest. Compounded across every decision a company makes in a year, it is anything but.

Line-art illustration of a research paper with a rising bar chart and a percent badge

Why informed beats loud

Without data, decisions default to the HiPPO — the highest-paid person's opinion. Analytics doesn't just improve the quality of answers; it changes who gets to be right. A junior analyst with a funnel chart can overrule a boardroom hunch, and that is exactly how it should be.

Line-art illustration of a hippo wearing a crown, ignoring a small rising chart — the HiPPO problem

Payments makes the point vividly, because card programmes live and die on numbers nobody can eyeball: activation rates, first-transaction time, decline reasons, drop-off between KYC steps. Take a hypothetical from a programme I know well — the corporate card issuing project I led with Pomelo Pay in the UK. Say 1,000 businesses start an application in launch month, and only 300 ever make a first transaction. The instinct in the room blames pricing, or marketing. But instrument the funnel and a different story appears: most of the loss sits at a single step — directors uploading identity documents, usually from a phone, without the paperwork at hand.

The fix isn't a rebrand — it's save-and-resume, and accepting a photo instead of a PDF. Recover even a third of those abandoners and activations double without spending another pound on acquisition. That's what analytics buys you: fixing the actual leak instead of the loudest theory.

Line-art funnel illustration: applications narrowing toward activation, with a leak escaping mid-funnel toward an identity document

How to start without boiling the ocean

You don't need a data warehouse to be informed. You need three things per launch: a definition of success written down before you ship, instrumentation on the handful of events that measure it, and a standing habit of looking. Even this website quietly counts its visits, which projects get clicked, and how often the resume gets downloaded — not because the stakes are high, but because feedback loops are a habit, and habits compound.

Line-art illustration of a clipboard with three checked boxes — define success, instrument events, keep looking

Being informed doesn't guarantee being right. It does something more valuable: it shrinks the cost of being wrong, because you find out sooner. As the old saying goes — without data, you're just another person with an opinion.