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by itsoktocry
992 days ago
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>Have you ever had a decision maker who struggles to articulate what business decisions they want to improve? How do you handle that? Hah, 90% of the time. I think a big part at being good at this job is being able to coerce that information from people. You need a process of drilling down, kind of like the 5 Whys[0]. You want to make more profits, right? That means we need to either increase revenues or decrease costs. Are we measuring all these things (you'd be surprised at the number of seemingly successful companies who can't)? Okay, how do we affect revenue? By increasing the number of users or increasing the revenue per user. Are we measuring those things? And on and on. It's a perfect way to iterate, and as the company matures it can be infinitely more and more sophisticated. For lower level people, sometimes it means sitting there and watching them do their job. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_whys |
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It can be easy to have a cynical view of what people are asking for, but in my experience there is often real value you can uncover.
One thing which helped me a lot is having a decent understanding of accounting and finance. A fun, and fairly quick, way to develop that is by taking a course on financial modelling (in excel). Modelling a business in a spreadsheet is a lot of fun, and it helps you build good intuition on the underlying "physics" of how a business makes money.