If you want to get real value from your analytics platform, embrace and nurture a cycle of Learn, Think, Do.

Learn
Measure your customers, your product, how your customers use your product, and every part of delivering value to your customers.

Think
Derive insight from that data. Identify the key metrics and how they interact with each other. Find out what success looks like—and what failure looks like, too.

Do
Form a hypothesis, create experiments and take action! Try to improve your customers’ experience, then go back to the beginning to measure what happened.

Better outcomes, such as more profit or customer base growth, don’t come from a single decision; they come from continuous decision-making rooted in insight and measurement. Daily and weekly execution against targeted metrics concentrates your efforts and grows not just your business but also your people. As they learn more, they can do more.

Learn, Think, Do is a simple three-word mantra that captures the flywheel of informed decision-making: each action will generate new data that feeds back into the process. When we start, our learning, thinking and doing are all rudimentary, so relatively little value is derived. We have minimal data and must rely on our past experience and intuition to make predictions. We ask questions, but we might ask bad questions. We will ask bad questions. It’s through asking, answering and taking actions, however, that we evolve our questions and spin the flywheel faster. As we improve our measurement, as our questions and thinking advance, we achieve greater insight and take meaningful actions. The planning horizon gets pushed further out, allowing for longer range decisions.

Effective actions impact your metrics. The right actions impact the right metrics. The Learn, Think, Do flywheel provides continuous feedback on how your teams and companies are performing, which gives you the ability to apply constant course correction. Shorten the cycle from measurement to analysis to action to get faster feedback on your business. By spinning the wheel faster and taking more targeted actions, we grow faster.

There are two ways to make the flywheel spin faster.

• Add Power
• Reduce Friction

Both are effective and both are necessary. We need to examine our own processes to understand which constraint—friction or lack of power—is holding us back the most.

Get real value from your analytics investments by embracing a cycle of continuous improvement. Have patience, work daily and spin the flywheel.