^{READ TIME: 6 MINUTES}

In partnership with Count.co - check them out, they’re wonderful👇🏻

What if your OKRs actually told you whether your company is on track to hit its goals—and every team could track them, and understand how they were contributing to them?

In this webinar, leaders from Intruder — including the Head of Data, VP of Product, and Head of Marketing — share how they made OKRs visible, trackable and aligned to business priorities.

Learn how they put data at the heart of growth by aligning stakeholders, tying team output to company growth and turning performance data into strategic decisions.

This session is ideal for leaders who want OKRs to move from abstract goals to actionable levers for growth.

Check it out here!

💡Start presenting insights pitching opportunities.

Most data people think their job ends at the moment they deliver an insight.

“Here’s the dashboard, here’s what we’ve learned, you’re welcome.”

We walk away really proud of ourselves like we’ve made a huge difference. Go us.

But if you really want to be seen as a value driver in your business, you need to go further.

The real 10x data professionals don’t just hand over charts. They use the data they’ve analysed to propose actual business opportunities.

Unfortunately, if you don’t play this bigger game, you’ll always be seen as the person providing the background noise in someone else’s PowerPoint, rather than the one helping shape the strategy.

In today’s post I’m going to share with you my actionable approach to moving from insight to opportunity, as well a little story from my time as Global Head of Data at one of the world’s most well know pizza brands.

_{(scroll down below for the results of last weeks poll)}

What happens if you stop at ‘insight’?

If you never move beyond insight, you risk:

1. Being sidelined in key business conversations
When you only deliver analysis without a strong recommendation, you leave the heavy lifting and cognitive load to others. They’ll forget you were the one who found the original signal in the first place and they’ll remember the fact that you didn’t go the extra mile.

2. Watching opportunities pass you by
Your data is full of untapped ideas for growth. If you don’t bring them forward, someone else will. They’ll also get the credit (and promotions) that could have been yours.

3. Stunting your career progression
Leaders aren’t made by dashboards. They’re made by those who connect the dots between data and business growth. Without showing this skill, you’ll plateau. Do you want your career legacy to be a few lines on some charts? I do not.

4. Reinforcing the ‘service desk’ model of data
Every time you stop at insight, you reinforce the idea that the data team is there to serve requests, not to set the direction. That’s not influence... It’s busy work that companies usually place first on the chopping board when times get tough (which by the way you did nothing to help avoid).

Here’s the good news: it doesn’t have to be this way.

🍕 Story time: A pizza the action

Back when I was leading a data team, we noticed something odd in the data in a number of our markets: weekday lunchtime site traffic was higher than expected, and average basket sizes were relatively huge, but conversion rates were dreadful…

Digging deeper, two things stood out. First, people were browsing hours before they actually wanted to order - likely perusing the menu ahead of time (ok, fine).

Second, upon doing a little extra digging it occurred to us that many large midday orders were coming from office parks or central urban locations. Qual research uncovered that this was big groups of people who just wanted to order lots of individual pizzas for their staff.

The problem? Our apps/websites weren’t really built for them. They were designed primarily for families ordering dinner in the evening. The flow made it easy to grab two pizzas, a couple of sides and drinks - perfect for a family order. But it made bulk daytime orders unnecessarily complicated.

So, we pitched a change: A redesign tailored for daytime office group orders, making it simpler to buy a large number of individual pizzas in one go during those midday hours to ensure we were catering to this forgotten, yet profitable, customer segment.

The result: higher conversions at lunchtime, bigger average order values, and a nice boost in revenues.

That didn’t come from just “sharing the insight”. It came from spotting the business opportunity, framing it, and pitching it with a hypothesis.

Moving from insights to opportunities

Here’s how you start stepping up:

1. Treat every analysis as the start, not the end
Don’t stop once you’ve uncovered the “what”. Ask yourself: “So what? What business lever does this insight suggest we could pull?”

2. Frame opportunities in business language
Instead of dumping stats, pitch it like a business case. What’s the opportunity size? What’s the cost of not acting? What experiment could test this?

3. Collaborate with domain peers
Bring in product, sales, or marketing early to socialise your idea. They’ll help validate whether the idea is feasible, and they’ll also become allies in pushing it through if you’re able to gather their buy in.

4. Build the hypothesis, then the story
Turn your analysis into a clear “if we do X, we should see Y” hypothesis. Package it up as a story with a proposed next step (experiment, pilot, MVP).

5. Pitch it with confidence
You’re not just a data person anymore. You’re someone proposing new growth opportunities for the business. That’s influence. That’s impact.

Dashboards don’t get promotions. People who pitch million-pound ideas do. Which one do you want to be?

The next business opportunity is already sitting in your data. The only question is whether you’ll be the one brave enough to pitch it?

Tristan Burns

Find me on LinkedIn or Book a 1:1 call