Hello, everyone.
Welcome to the new subscribers who have joined us following the release of my new e-book, the Enshittification of Programmatic Sampling. (I did not make up that term!) And hello to those of you who have been with me for a while.
With the launch of my e-book, I am relaunching my newsletter, which has been on hiatus since July.
I have a new format. Rather than long-form articles (which I will still write, but not every weekend!), I will be sharing short but powerful ideas that are designed to help you be a more effective insights or data leader, whatever your role or place in the ecosystem.
SHOT. CHASER. INSIGHT. is about taking a powerful idea and decomposing it into something you can do.
- SHOT: The important thing people tell you to do that sounds really easy, but is often much harder, to do
- CHASER: The reality behind the “shot,” and what you need to do to make it happen
- INSIGHT: The “why” behind it all.
I will deliver this every week on Saturday morning. Let me know what you think, and thank you for subscribing. (And if this format doesn’t resonate with you, you can always unsubscribe.)
SHOT
Never compromise on quality!
CHASER
Uh… ok, so help me answer a few questions:
- How do we define quality How do we measure it?
- What is our current level of quality?
- Where do we have quality problems now that we need to fix? What might we do to prevent quality problems from happening
- [SUPPLIER] What level of quality do our clients want, and what is the impact on revenue? How do we compare to our competitors? What are the cost and timing implications of quality
- [BUYER] What level of quality can our suppliers produce? How do different suppliers compare? What are the implications in terms of cost and speed?
INSIGHT
This week’s newsletter is inspired by my ebook that speaks to issues around sample quality. We can zoom out from the discussion of sample to speak more generally about quality, which is one of the essential elements by which we assess basically every aspect of research and data products.
There are two key truths about quality.
- Quality is meaningless without context and precision. It must be defined, measured, and evaluated in terms of tradeoffs.
- Quality is a variable, not a constant. The question is never “Should we have quality?” but rather “What level of quality?”
Companies should be making conscious decisions about where on the spectrum of quality they want to operate. From there, they need to build the systems and processes to optimize quality at that level. Compromising below that level should never happen: that’s failure. Similarly, going above that level should be equally rare: a business will typically not be able to operate sustainably at that higher level without a structural change to its operating model.