Seems like I’ve been talking a lot lately about data, metrics, KPIs, and how that impacts your strategy, vision, and decision making.

Well, here’s more.

Here’s something I’ve witnessed that, in retrospect, is pretty fascinating. One time I was part of a team that covered an extremely large territory as a specialized service provider. We covered a large spectrum of customers and had a variety of playbooks and offerings to help deliver results to those customers, including existing codebases of our most common design patterns to be able to move quickly with custom software products and solutions.

At the time, I had been with the team the longest and that, combined with the fact that I was also one of the most senior and experienced persons on the team in terms of career (not just the team), meant that I had pretty good instincts for what the customers wanted. Despite that, I tried to take specific actions to make intentional decisions on what our customer demand signals and common asks really were, in order to better align our product portfolio and research tasks for future offerings. I would review every project for the last year and do some analysis work on common requirements and business outcomes, and I would also attend many customer sales pitches, again, to understand what customers were asking for and wanted.

By the way, we are talking dozens, if not a hundred, projects in just one calendar year alone. So we had a lot of data.

Well, what happened was interesting. We would have a single customer ask for one thing, something we’ve never really done before. Or we would have people who worked on maybe three of those 100 projects be involved in our strategy and roadmap conversations. And somehow those single data points would be conflated into a prioritized customer demand, and that’s where we would start spending a lot of effort.

It made no sense to me. It’s as if I sold pizza, and overwhelmingly sold pepperoni pizzas, but out of those hundreds of pizzas, two customers asked for chicken alfredo pizza. And somehow we decided that meant we needed to go all-in on chicken alfredo pizza.

Why does this happen? I suspect it’s at least partially because the pepperoni pizza is basic and boring. It’s really well known exactly how to make a pepperoni pizza, and people like to build new things. With chicken alfredo there’s an opportunity to experiment and try something new, and maybe even be recognized as “the inventor of chicken alfredo pizza”.

I get the need to discover new markets, innovate, change, and all that. And of course there’s always a opportunity with “Build it and they will come.” But another really valuable lesson I’ve learned is it’s generally easier to keep your existing customers and make them happy repeat customers, than to hunt and find new customers.

If you are an established business and you’re trying to grow, or at least just continue to be financially healthy, then don’t ignore your bread-and-butter in the pursuit of something new “just because”. Definitely find time and budget to experiment, innovate, and maybe find the next big idea. But don’t ignore your existing data and financials and make sure you keep your solid foundation. And most importantly, just because you heard one customer ask for feature X, or you worked on one project that did feature X, does NOT mean that feature X is suddenly what everyone wants. Sure, it makes sense to maybe research X a little, but be careful of assuming a very small number of anecdotes is the same thing as “a preponderance of data” in your decision making.