7 Tips for Influencing (Engineers) With Qualitative Data
1. Share great stories, not just data.
Go for the unexpected, the truly surprising, or even shocking story. Find and share the why, not just the how and what. Telling stories in engaging ways will go much further and be retained a lot better than simply referencing a few data points.
2. Get them into the field to gain first-hand knowledge and experience.
I remember bringing a senior engineering manager to a customer visit—we were there to learn, from the end-user’s perspective, how a certain set of features were being used. Initial words out of the customer, “The first thing I do is disable that feature, because it’s too annoying and useless.” I wish I had a picture of the jaw-dropping expression of our engineer. This was something that he experienced first-hand and stayed with him forever.
3. Focus on sharing insights and results, not your process.
Guess what, people don’t really care about how you framed the problem, set up the research, selected the participants, used specialized interviewing skills to listen to customers, clustered your results, and finally came up with actionable insights—they just don’t care. They will care about cutting to the chase and seeing truly insightful results up front and center. In my experience, this is especially true when presenting to senior executives—they want the answers upfront, not a lengthy description of how you got there.
4. Personalize the data by aggregating data from real people, real situations, real-time.
It’s not about pure statistics and numbers, it’s about how people really feel about your product, service, experience. Outside of being there in person to experience customer reactions, share individualized stories from real people working with real challenges, in authentic settings. Be real.
5. Make connections to known solutions with precursors, analogies, and metaphors.
In general, it’s much easier to connect new insights and ideas with known, more tangible examples—it’s like the Uber of dog walking, or it’s like the experience of riding a cable car (fun, loud, social.)
6. Let people speak for themselves through video snippets and quotes.
Even with, or sometimes especially with, low-production quality video, sharing what you saw and heard in the field through video or audio can be quite effective. There’s something quite compelling when you can share snippets of different individuals (representing different roles, or companies, or ages) saying essentially the same thing, but in their own words with their own stories.
7. Format the qualitative data to look like quantitative data.
When you’re gathering qualitative data, you need to be rigorous and process-driven, similar to gathering and analyzing quantitative data. One way of making qualitative data approachable and interesting to engineers is to use visual formats that look quantitative. One of my favorite tools is the Insight Matrix tool (created by Vijay Kumar and Brandon Schauer at the IIT Institute of Design), which is an Excel spreadsheet add-on tool that clusters and displays insights. In short, it’s a basic spreadsheet version of a post-it clustering session. However, the effect of sharing the data in this format continues to amaze me. After sharing an initial clustering of insights with the Insight Matrix, a senior software architect exclaimed, “I have no idea what that is, but it is so cool…” This opened up the door for the engineer toward wanting to try to understand.
“Seek first to understand, then to be understood.” —Stephen R. Covey
Reflection
If you’re hoping to influence others, my core principle is to start with empathy—get into their shoes, see and experience the world from their point of view. This is important, not just for understanding your end-users/customers, but also the key to working effectively with your colleagues and stakeholders.
