Why Quantitative Data is Key to Building great digital products

In the last few years, data has been a huge element for success in different industries in the world including the tech industries, which is the reason why even some careers have become a big deal. We have heard of data scientists or data engineers and other data-related jobs recently being one of the high-paying jobs in the tech industry, and it will even keep increasing. You might be wondering why, and the answer is very simple.

In this new digital era, where technology has been the trend in business, the competition has increased. And when the competition is very high, companies make sure their decisions are as accurate as possible in order to not leave room for mistakes. You can’t talk about accurate decisions without talking about data-informed or data-driven decisions.

In such a sharp tech market, leaders and founders are relying on data to make smart decisions. Now when we are building digital products, I like to categorize the data into 2 main categories, which are Quantitative and Qualitative data, and today we are going to discuss Quantitative data and their role in building a great digital product.

Quantitative data is usually defined as data that can be counted or measured in numeric values. Let’s now bring this into a digital context, you have a platform or a mobile app, and the quantitative data are for example, the number of accounts created, number of orders made in a day, recurring monthly revenue, number of active users, and so on. Those are the numbers that we can measure, we don’t talk to customers to get those data.

Before I explain the 2 main roles of quantitative data, I would also like to mention the advantage or why this type of data makes life easier for founders and Product managers building digital products. The 2 main advantages of Quantitative data are that first of all they are accessible and second they are certain. 

By being accessible, I mean we don’t have to always reach our customers to find that data. As long as our app or platform is being used by our clients, we will always have that data at our fingertips. Secondly, the reason why I mentioned that they are certain is that they never lie, they only show what happened. There is a saying that says “Numbers never lie”. You might interpret them in the wrong way, but numbers are always true and certain.

Now that we have access to our data and we are 100% sure that they are true, how do our digital products benefit from that? I will discuss 2 key roles in this article.  One is the impact it has on the “User experience” and the second is how it helps to discover and analyze difficult and unusual scenarios.

1. Helps in improving the user experience

I like to say that the user experience is one of the most important aspects of digital products. Why? Your product might be offering great value to people, and it might be solving a huge problem, but are the people you are targeting able to connect with that value? Are they capable of accessing the value you are providing? That’s actually the best way to explain the user experience. If your product is hard to use in one way or another, users won’t be able to explore it. If they can’t fully explore it, it means they can’t fully get the value you are providing.

Now when with Quantitative, we are able to track the whole customer journey, and we can see exactly where our customers are struggling, and where they are leaving our product. By tracking our customer journey and knowing how every single user is interacting with our platform, we can easily learn something from that. The fact that we can see what is going on, what’s wrong and right, can help us in improving our user experience.

With Quantitative data, we have the privilege of knowing how users and customers engage with our product. We can make some decisions based on this. It all results in having an outstanding user experience. A kind reminder that even if you can ask your customers and users how their experience is, their answers are good, but not as accurate as the data you get from your analytical tools.

 2. Helps in discovering and analyzing difficult scenarios

If you have gotten a chance to work on a very big product with different customers, you know how hectic it can be to get some insights. It doesn’t matter which kind of product you worked on, there will always be some scenarios that are difficult to discover and analyze. 

For example, you wake up in the morning and you want to check how your customers are engaging with your product. And with the data you have, you can see some customers are engaging well with the product and others are struggling. First of all, you can’t discover that without Quantitative data, now the next step is to know what’s causing that. With the help of some tools, you can group the data into funnels ( funneling) and learn what customers that are struggling have in common, and those who are enjoying have in common. And from that, you can easily learn from that and make decisions accordingly.

With Quantitative data, you can even learn how the marketing is going, which channels are more effective than others and why, which campaign in the past was effective and why and so many other useful insights. These are not the things you can learn by talking to customers.

Concluding, I want to mention something, you can have quantitative data and still fail to get useful information out of it. These data are diamonds for someone who can learn from them, they can really help you to improve your product in every category, in sales, marketing, and even engineering, they all need Quantitative data in their daily activities. I hope you understand how big quantitative data can be for your product if used well. Tools that you use are also key in getting the best out of your data. There are some popular tools like google analytics, amplitude, mixpanel, and others that can help you. We will have time to dig deep into tools and their specialties in the next articles. Thanks for reading, please share it with others.