Targeted curiosity: Asking questions that drive outcomes
Knowing the right business questions to ask is a crucial skill for driving growth with data. It’s tempting to follow trails that seem interesting, but great questions are ones that align tightly to priorities, inform decisions and guide action. As you frame your next research initiative or analytics project, avoid meandering curiosity and formulate high-impact business questions by following these key principles.
Connect questions to company priorities
Great questions must be connected to strategic goals and objectives to ensure alignment across teams. The initiative needs to be big enough for all teams involved to care. Be specific enough to guide the work but broad enough to foster cross-functional motivation.
Evaluate potential for action
Start with the end in mind. High value business questions point clearly toward making or changing a decision. Influencing another internal or external decision maker can also be useful, but when considering the return on your investment of time and resources, be sure to appropriately account for the risk of not owning the call. Will the hypothesis lead to clear next steps, such as changing the product, the merchandising plan, or marketing strategy? Ask yourself, if I know the answer to this question, what will I do?
Match questions to the right data
It’s critical to match questions to the right data, platform and science to produce credible insights within a reasonable timeframe. However, many companies lack the integrated platforms and data needed for answering business questions. Tailored for data scientists, 84.51° Collaborative Cloud provides the ingredients for impact. It enables brands to deploy their data science resources against transaction data from more than 62 million households that shop at Kroger every year, fueling more accurate insights. Clients also receive access to our suite of pre-built data science packages, which help your data science team work faster and get more done. Brands can use our building blocks to understand assortment opportunities, build audiences, set up control sets for store testing and much more. 84.51° Collaborative Cloud empowers companies to tackle previously out-of-reach challenges that make a competitive difference within and beyond Kroger. Well-framed business questions align to strategy, inform decisions and spark action. In today’s complex retail environment, CPGs also need world-class analytics. It takes the right specialized resources – data science, technology and experts – to solve business problems. By deploying their talent against the right business questions and collaborating with our data scientists in 84.51° Collaborative Cloud, brands can win and grow.
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