“Google Analytics, Amplitude, or Mixpanel?” is the Wrong Question

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In order to turn sprints into breakthrough insights, you shouldn't be limiting yourself to any single analytics system, but instead, should understand how to correctly set up and use these systems to gain and maintain a tactical advantage.

The bigger challenge

At the heart of every growth challenge, there is an inherent resource allocation challenge. Wasted budget on campaigns and efforts that aren't moving the needle. It’s important to understand that it is unrealistic to expect consistent progress with your growth model on blind investments. Instead, you need targeted ones–inline with your key drivers of traction.

What is the growth model?

A growth model describes 5 things: acquiring new users, converting them to paying customers, making money, the product, and delivering it to customers. All five relate to traction. Therefore, traction needs to be at the core of how you define, measure, and report progress.

What does traction look like?

In Airbnb’s case, traction could be summed up into a single metric. Nights booked.

AirBnB’s Nights Booked

Boiling traction down to a single metric ensures all stakeholders understand and agree on what growth actually means, providing a solid foundation for the right type of questions.

So how do you fix sloppy growth investments?

Lean as a resource-management-system

The lean startup method has almost become the default way we launch and manage product innovation. The idea to systematically de-risk your startup with short sprints–one hypothesis at a time–works, and will help you avoid common pitfalls like building something nobody wants! Lean is a great way to build a business and manage startup innovation.

But how did we get here?

If you go back far enough, you’ll learn that the lean startup has its routes in the OODA loop theory, originally developed by John Boyd to give fighter pilots a tactical advantage in air-to-air combat. It has since been applied to business, medicine, sports… and has emerged as a decision-making framework for highly competitive environments.

OODA is about WINNING

Velocity is key to OODA and it is understood that the practitioner who can progress through the loop the quickest gains an agility advantage which can be used to defeat more powerful or better-funded opponents.

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To get OODA working for you, it’s critical to understand where you are in relation to where you want to be. How you plan on getting there. Then use analytics to surface KPIs that create sound situational awareness. In practice, for startups, this first step might mean creating a sprint plan.

OODA is about visibility

To maintain a good orientation, though, implies accurate observation. You need to be looking at a compass, for example, to know your heading.

Observation in the world of growth marketing can mean testing multiple channels, tactics, and different features simultaneously… then scanning for signs of traction. Translating results into ROI, comparing against previous results, and prioritising relevancy to the current objectives.

Advantage, therefore, can come from better situational awareness which you get from better observation derived from analytics. With that in mind, it’s fair to say that investing in your analytics systems is the price for better observation, which in turn helps you make better resource allocation decisions.

Why Unvanity — Better Resource Management Compounds

Work With Unvanity

Here at Unvanity, we understand that analytics is just the tool used to power business intelligence. Without custom work and upkeep, though, unactionable metrics will swamp your reporting and could derail growth.

We solve this by using a curated combination of frameworks and work with you to better define your challenge… then develop a case-specific analytics strategy which builds on your growth model, and user journeys… which then translates into a measurement plan that scales.

Rooted in lean and sprint culture, we help clients unlock hidden traction through business intelligence, sprint planning, and unconventional ideas. Unvanity exists to remove the vanity in your reporting and ensure budget flows into the initiatives moving the right metrics.

Data and knowledge that spark breakthrough insights.