Review: Thinking with Data

Great For Everyone — Not Just For Data Researchers

I highly recommend this book to anyone who is involved in the development of software products. This is because above all else, it’s a book about critical thinking within the context of product — and even more specifically, how to use Data to improve our products.

This book sits in a sweet spot of being high level enough to keep the content flowing as well as peppering it with pin point examples that succinctly illustrate the author’s point. The author doesn’t waste words overemphasizing points or tying concepts to any specific engineering or project management discipline.

This should be appreciated as it respects both the reader’s intelligence and time.

If your a product manager, engineer, designer…or anyone else involved in creating and growing products, I recommend this book to you.

Here is an excerpt which conveys my point. This is from Chapter 1 — Scoping: Why Before How:

“…Rather than saying, “The manager wants to know where users drop out on the way to buying something,” consider saying, “The manager wants more users to finish their purchases. How do we encourage that?” Answering the first question is a component of doing the second, but the action-oriented formulation opens up more possibilities, such as testing new designs and performing user experience interviews to gather more data.

If it is not helpful to phrase something in terms of an action, it should at least be related to some larger strategic question. For example, understanding how users of a product are migrating from desktop to mobile versions of a website is useful for informing the product strategy, even if there is no obvious action to take afterward…”

Also, Amazon doesn’t have a table of contents for this book so here it is:

1. Scoping: Why Before How
2. What’s Next?
3. Arguments
4. Patterns of Reasoning
5. Causality
6. Putting It All Together
7. Further Reading

The book is available here from amazon.