Making Smarter & More Profitable Decisions
Understanding the Role of Data in Product Management
Here's what I see time and again: business owners are drowning in data but starving for clarity.
They've got spreadsheets, dashboards, analytics platforms firing off alerts every five minutes and they're still making decisions based on hunches.
It's nuts, really.
And it's costing them money.
Why I Care About This
I work with product managers and business owners every day, and the ones who pull ahead aren't necessarily the smartest.
They're the ones who've learned to listen to what the numbers are actually telling them.
Data isn't about complexity.
It's about clarity.
It's about looking at what's really happening in your business, not what you hope is happening or what you assume is happening.
I always say: "What gets measured, gets managed and what gets managed, improves." That's not clever marketing speak. That's just how business works.
You can see this philosophy in action in my Business Growth Coaching process.
The Real Problem? Too Much Noise
Most business owners I coach don't need more data.
They need less.
They need to know:
Which customers actually stick around?
Which products make real money?
Where's the bottleneck slowing everything down?
What's the market actually telling us?
Not the other way around, they don't need to know everything. They need to know what matters.
So I always ask my clients to focus on decision-grade data, the stuff that actually changes what you do.
That might look like:
Customer behaviour — Are people coming back? What are they actually using? Are we losing them to someone else?
The money side — Which products are genuinely profitable? Which ones just look busy but drain cash?
Operations — Where are things stuck? What's slowing us down from getting products to market faster?
What's happening outside — How are competitors moving? What's changing in the market that we need to see early?
When you focus on these things, the picture becomes clearer. Fast.
How This Actually Changes Your Business
I've seen the difference it makes. And it's not subtle.
When you stop guessing and start measuring, your decisions get faster and better.
You know what to push forward and what to kill.
You don't waste energy on products that don't deserve it, and you double down on the ones that do.
Your customers shift constantly, their tastes, what they'll pay for, what they expect. If you're not regularly looking at what they're actually doing and saying, you'll miss the moment they leave you for someone else.
And here's the thing that gets me excited: when you know which products deliver the real value and which ones are just taking up shelf space, you can be intentional about where your time and money go. Most business owners spread themselves too thin.
Data helps you focus.
I talk about this concept of "ideal product fit" the sweet spot where you deliver the most value with the least friction.
That's where your real profit lives.
And you only find it by paying attention. This ties directly into the A clean, simple checklist with boxes ticked. because knowing who benefits most from your product naturally tells you which products matter most.
Building This Into Your Culture
This doesn't work if data is something that happens once a quarter when the accountant gets involved.
You need it woven into how you actually run things.
Your team needs to understand it. Your systems need to talk to each other so everyone's working from the same facts. You need to know who's responsible for what's measured.
And when something improves because you looked at the data and changed course, you celebrate that. You point it out. You make it normal.
This is what I focus on in the ProfiTune Board – 15 Things Every CEO Must Do framework. Top-performing leaders don't monitor results sporadically, they do it systematically, across customer satisfaction, financial outcomes, and team performance. It becomes part of how you operate.
When data becomes part of the conversation around the table every week, not this mysterious thing the analytics person does, then everything shifts.
Where I'd Start
If you're serious about doing this and you should be, don't try the impossible.
Start by getting clear on what actually matters to you.
For some businesses it's profit margin.
For others it's customer retention or how fast you can launch. Figure out what moves the needle for you.
Then make sure you're actually capturing clean data. If your systems are messy, your insights will be too.
Set aside time every month or quarter to actually look at what you're measuring.
And this is key: when you see something, do something about it. Test it. Change it. Don't just file the report away.
If you want to dig deeper into how testing and measuring actually works in practice, my Business Analysis guide walks you through the real mechanics.
The Bottom Line
I'm not saying data replaces your gut.
It doesn't. Your intuition, that is built on years of experience, matters.
But intuition without data is just guessing. And guessing gets expensive.
Data refines your gut. It takes away the guesswork. It shows you where the real opportunities are hiding.
As I tell my clients: "If you can measure it, you can improve it and if you can improve it, you can profit from it."
That's it. That's the game.
Further Resources:
Want to explore this further?
I work with business owners on exactly this, cutting through the noise to find the decisions that actually matter. If this resonates, let's talk.