Data-Driven Work Cultures: Omri Fridman of GlassesUSA On How To Effectively Leverage Data To Take Your Company To The Next Level
An Interview With Pierre Brunelle
Removing barriers to data — data should be accessible and presented in an appealing way. If data is hard to read, it won’t be followed and monitored. Common mistakes include too much information and bad visualization. Use the right tools to share the relevant information with the different teams and that allows you to do it effortlessly in an appealing way.
As part of our series about “How To Effectively Leverage Data To Take Your Company To The Next Level”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Omri Fridman.
Omri is a highly driven strategy professional with over 10 years of international experience and knowledge in business analytics and business operations. In my previous roles, I worked as a strategic advisor at PricewaterhouseCoopers, and as an investment manager at private equity firms. It was my bread and butter to analyze the results of products, companies, and markets, and those positions were definitely the best data analysis schools I could ever imagine.Working as a consultant for years, I decided what I really want to do is work within a company and use my skills to optimize growth and results by being heavily data-driven. In my current position at GlassesUSA.com, I lead 2 of the company’s business units and own their P&L, strategy, and operations. The fact remains — my day job is to ensure that our business decisions are based on data and that data is processed in a way it leads to growth and superior results.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series. Before we dive in, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you got started?
The pleasure is mine, thank you for having me here. It’s funny, but from quite a young age I was fascinated by how businesses work. My dad taught me about the stock exchange and took me to buy stocks on ATMs probably when I was 6, so that doesn’t leave you with much options. I studied Accounting and Economics and after my graduation I joined the advisory firm of PwC, where I had the privilege of consulting managements of large corporations in a very early stage of my career. My next step was as part of the investment team of a private equity firm, but even though in both I worked with lots of companies’ management on optimizing results, I wanted to be more hands on — I wanted to improve results myself. I had the privilege to join GlassesUSA.com 4 years ago and I currently lead 2 of this amazing company’s business units.
Is there a particular book, podcast, or film that made a significant impact on you? Can you share a story or explain why it resonated with you so much?
Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, a world-famous psychologist is definitely one of my top picks for anyone that wants to understand the mystery of decision making. It’s a manual for the full range of human brain function — from using automatic intuition to analytical and conscious thinking. Doesn’t matter what product or service you offer, in the end a person will decide if it’s worth buying or using, and people decide in a much more structured way than we expect. In my opinion, the analysis of business results without understanding the human decision making process, will always be partial.
Are you working on any new, exciting projects now? How do you think that might help people?
At GlassesUSA.com, we are constantly working on a variety of projects to improve the shopping experience we offer to our customers. Our contact lenses house brand (called Vista plus if any readers out there are contact wearers :) ) is one example — by analyzing data and interviewing customers, we discovered a market failure in the contact lenses market — there was no product that is both formulated to the highest quality and health standard and cost effective. After a long research and development phase and a very hard work of our product, design and operations teams, we launched a house brand contacts that is a dream come true for contacts users. It became a bestseller in no time and made us very proud parents.
Thank you for all that. Let’s now turn to the main focus of our discussion about empowering organizations to be more “data-driven.” My work centers on the value of data visualization and data collaboration at all levels of an organization, so I’m particularly passionate about this topic. For the benefit of our readers, can you help explain what exactly it means to be data-driven? On a practical level, what does it look like to use data to make decisions?
That’s the million dollar question — how do you turn a business from relying on gut feelings and status quo into a highly data-driven business. From my experience, this complex, demanding process consists of two parts; a solid data infrastructure and a data driven work culture. The first part includes having the right tools and the right people that have knowledge and experience that allows them to harness the company’s data and turn it into useful information. If you did that right, you now have extremely important insights. Now you need to turn all that data into action items, but unfortunately, most companies stop on this phase without even knowing. The company’s management has to include people that understand the importance and create a data driven work culture that include structured processes that turn business insights to business decisions. Only then will significant companies’ resources invest in data analysis matures into improved business results and be more than just interesting knowledge.
Which companies can most benefit from tools that empower data collaboration?
I must say that I can’t think of a company that won’t benefit tremendously from a structured, efficient process of turning data into business decisions. I think that most companies and management have understood the importance of utilizing data in business decisions for quite some time, but despite the improved technologies and the endless amount of data, most companies still struggle with implementing these processes properly.
We’d love to hear about your experiences using data to drive decisions. In your experience, how has data analytics and data collaboration helped improve operations, processes, and customer experiences? We’d love to hear some stories if possible.
Back when GlasseUSA.com first started its contacts segment, it worked on the existing glasses segment infrastructure, as is usually the case when introducing a new segment. Data we collected and analyzed revealed how different those two products are, as well as how different the customer journey is between the two products. In order to address the unique needs of these different customers, we designed a tailored user experience — from the online customer journey through our operations and customer service.
I can share one example — customers who are interested in buying designer glasses or prescription sunglasses are usually looking for an insightful, enjoyable shopping experience that allows them to compare options and find their perfect match that fits their fashion desires, their health needs, and their budget. Despite doing it incredibly well, and improving every day, the data has taught us that contact lens purchase is more of a task, which customers want to check off on their to-do list as quickly, easily and cost efficiently as possible. We understood the customer need is fundamentally different for this product, and with that understanding we designed a dedicated user interface that allows new customers to easily find their product, make sure they get the best price and receive their products very quickly. Moreover, returning customers can reorder their products in two clicks. Results were immediate and incredible.
Has the shift towards becoming more data-driven been challenging for some teams or organizations from your vantage point? What are the challenges? How can organizations solve these challenges?
The shift is definitely challenging due to a number of reasons, including, but not limited to, our natural impulse to act based on gut feelings and experience, turning data analysis results into knowledge only instead of action items as a result of failure in the process, and so on.
One important step organizations can take to tackle most challenges on their way to becoming more data driven in their decision making process, is to make sure there is someone within the company who can connect the dots — it might be a dedicated strategy or business operations team, or the responsibility of an experienced management member. However, it has to be someone that has exceptional analytical skills, is very business oriented, has a high level understanding of the entire organization and its strategy and most importantly is trusted and has the authority to lead and implement cross company initiatives. This person or team’s roles will be to work with all other relevant teams, from data and BI to all of the data consumers, and to make sure a seamless process exists so that raw data from one side of the process becoming business decisions on the other end, and that every business decision is based on the relevant, accurate and updated data-based insights.
Ok. Thank you. Here is the primary question of our discussion. Based on your experience and success, what are “Five Ways a Company Can Effectively Leverage Data to Take It To The Next Level”? Please share a story or an example for each.
- Creating senior management commitment — if the company’s (very) top management isn’t fully committed to a data-driven culture and allows business decisions not based on data to be made, such a work culture is unlikely to emerge. Data-driven decision making forces people to change their behavior, which might be inconvenient to some. Managers should be clear and explicit that nothing that is not properly based on data can be accepted and approved (including enforcement over the most famous reasonings “that’s what we did so far”, and “that’s what our competitors are doing”)
- Choosing relevant metrics — unnecessary and irrelevant data, are the silent killers of dashboards and reports. Data should be used to deliver insights to improve performance, not as a nice-to-have knowledge. Be sure to know what the relevant end goal is before choosing the necessary data you need to analyze, share and present.
- Connecting metrics to KPIs and goals — metrics are fine, but employees are too busy and overwhelmed by information to notice and care about what is not part of their KPIs and goals. Communicate to the teams the relation between each of the metrics to their personal goals and to the general targets and KPIs.
- Removing barriers to data — data should be accessible and presented in an appealing way. If data is hard to read, it won’t be followed and monitored. Common mistakes include too much information and bad visualization. Use the right tools to share the relevant information with the different teams and that allows you to do it effortlessly in an appealing way.
- Combining different skills for data analysis — the best and most efficient insights are a result of an analysis done together by data analysts with high technical abilities, business experts, product managers, operation experts, managers with a wider understanding of the company etc. The combination of skills and knowledge allow the insights to be more accurate, relevant, efficient and something that will actually eventually turn into action items that will improve business results.
The name of this series is “Data-Driven Work Cultures”. Changing a culture is hard. What would you suggest is needed to change a work culture to become more Data Driven?
Explaining to a management that want to create a data driven work culture that what needs to be done is that from now on their business decisions must be based on data analysis conclusions is oftentimes like explaining to someone who wants to quit smoking that all he needs to do is to stop lighting cigarettes — that’s obvious but hard to actually follow. A real shift consists of many small changes, but from a big picture perspective I think that the change must include a more structured and monitored decision-making process that is data-driven, as if not, our instinct is to base decisions on what’s more familiar — our experience and the current common knowledge.
The future of work has recently become very fluid. Based on your experience, how do you think the needs for data will evolve and change over the next five years?
Although the hybrid work model and remote roles have increased sharply in a quite short time as a result of the circumstances, I think that the shift to working online and cloud storage that occurred in the preceding decades were a pretty good preparation and the changes were majorly technical. Nevertheless, the continuous improvement of technology enables us to collect and analyze growing amounts of data. It’s a process that is only accelerating over the past few years and I expect it will continue in the near future. As a result, I think that the real challenge will be to simultaneously improve our abilities of separating the wheat from the chaff — how we will be able to easily find and focus on what’s really important in this endless pile of data, and how technology will be able to assist us in putting the finger on what’s really matter quickly and efficiently.
Does your organization have any exciting goals for the near future? What challenges will you need to tackle to reach them? How do you think data analytics can best help you to achieve these goals?
We are on a continuous journey to be customers-focused and improve our eyewear shopping experience to be as enjoyable and easy as possible. Based on our data analysis insights and our audience’s behaviors we have exciting plans on new ways to get to our customers and offer unique experiences. Like any new initiative we are trying, we know that a lot of experiments and back and forth will be a part of the journey, but we also know that if we continuously base our business decisions on data analytics, we are going to reach and exceed our goals in the most efficient way possible. Stay tuned for exciting news soon!
How can our readers further follow your work?
I am always interested to meet new people and discuss exciting ideas, so they are more than welcome to connect with me through my LinkedIn. Moreover, follow GlassesUSA.com’s blog and most importantly — visit our online store when you need a new pair of glasses or out of your contacts and see for yourself if our data-driven experience lives up to the hype.
Thank you so much for sharing these important insights. We wish you continued success and good health!
