The power of data

It’s painful, it’s brutal and it’s a little sadistic. But it’s wonderful.

Data to product managers is like ammunition to an assassin; nothing gives us more pleasure than gently annihilating a loud, forceful stakeholder with an incisive bullet of data which obliterates their stance in a few seconds.

And then the silence.

Those short, awkward seconds of silence after a killer piece of data is presented in a meeting is almost as satisfying as the utterly dismayed looks on people’s faces which typically follows.

The people in the meeting room shift around in their seats, twiddle their pens and look at their own notes; grasping at any last straws that might salvage their arguments.

Without the data, the meeting would inevitably have been a long and arduous slog of opinion-based drivel, ending with the either the loudest person or the highest paid person (HIPPO)’s winning the day.

Am I saying opinions don’t count? No. Of course they do. But ultimately, a potent blend of opinion, persuasion and data will ensure you win the day.

Typically, as product managers we’re comfortable using 3rd party tools such as Google Analytics, MixPanel or KISS metrics to get our own data, but when it comes to interacting with databases directly, we often rely on other people to get the data we need before meeting with stakeholders or putting together decks for a herd of HIPPOS.

In larger corporates, there are entire teams set up specifically to deal with and manage your data. If you want a bit of data, you need to make a formal request and you might get it a few days later. In smaller companies, it’s usually the engineering team’s responsibility to retrieve the data – or the business analysts if you have them.

But what if you didn’t need to rely on other people? It’s an extremely useful skill to be able to interact directly with a database yourself and retrieve the data you need, whenever you want to.

One of the most popular languages used for creating, retrieving, updating and deleting data from a database is SQL.

With even a little bit of SQL knowledge you’ll be able to write queries, generate reports and completely bypass your data teams in some instances.

So you want to know more about SQL? OK, great.