I had not come across it yet. Lot of good stuff in there:
I'm in love with the idea of using data to improve business processes.
The folks at Treehouse have recently done just that:
The idea is pretty simple: Create a list of users who look like they’re about to cancel, based on the past behavior of users who cancelled. Then contact this list and ask how you can help them or give them ideas on how to better utilize the service. Ideally, this should discourage them from cancelling.From http://ryancarson.com/post/23942657106/reducing-churn-with-econometrics
37signals has also had an in-house analyst for the past 2 years. When you have enough data to run interesting analysis with, I'm pretty sure the results can be amazing. It's the best way to ensure that your initiatives have actual results and to put quarrels about what you should be working on next to rest. I look forward to exploring this more within XWiki.
Some great nuggets of insight in this piece about Google's POPS team (POPS stands as a shortcut for People Operations).
On the optimal number of interviews for prospective hires:
After crunching the data, Carlisle found that the optimal interview rate—the number of interviews after which the candidate’s average score would converge on his final score—was four. “After four interviews,” Carlisle says, “you get diminishing returns.” Presented with this data, Google’s army of engineers was convinced. Interview times shrunk, and Google’s hiring sped up.On the bonus vs raise debate:
The group ran a “conjoint survey” in which it asked employees to choose the best among many competing pay options. For instance, would you rather have $1,000 more in salary or $2,000 as a bonus? “What we found was that they valued base pay above all,” Setty says. “When we offered a bonus of X, they valued that at what it costs us. But if you give someone a dollar in base pay, they value it at more than a dollar because of the long-term certainty.”Google has taken a scientific approach to employee happiness. It's worth it.
Great point:
I like this approach very much. I think the basic fee for participating as a seller in a peer network should be as low as possible. This allows the marketplace to develop as much liquidity as possible. Increasing transaction fees will push sellers out of your market into other ones. The better approach to increasing revenues is value added services that sellers can avail themselves of but are not required to. If these services allow sellers to sell more or if they make selling easier, sellers will adopt them and your take rate can ultimately be much larger than your transaction fee.
Some very interesting advice:
Clayton [Christensen] contends that “products find a certain market only when they help their customers get done the jobs that they have already been trying to do.” [...] You say people aren’t switching from anything to use what you’ve built?
That means one of two things: either you don’t understand your product, or no one wants what you’re selling. Every product has competitors. Sometimes they’re other products and sometimes they’re human processes.
It's another way to phrase a common truth: people don't uncover new needs when they build new products, they find better ways to answer existing needs. The same is true for a product such as the iPad: nothing you can't already do with a computer, yet much better in a lot of ways.