Strategy: what is an insight, really?

Defining the essential ingredient needed for a strong product strategy.

Developing an effective product strategy depends on one raw ingredient above all: insights.

Being good product leaders, we hunt for these insights and try to pump them around our org so everyone has the latest and greatest context.

Things improve, but not as much as we hoped. Why?

In our eagerness to improve, we've lost sight of what makes an insight an insight. While everyone advocates for insight-driven strategy, insights are rarely defined. So what is an insight?

An insight is an understanding of the true nature of something.

Important “somethings” you want insight into are your customers, their challenges, their hidden motivations and worldview, the nature of the market you compete in, new enabling technologies, industry shifts, and many more. We earn these insights through deep investigation.

An insight is not just a data point. An insight shines new light: we become enlightened to the truth of something. This yields a deeper, intuitive understanding of how that thing really works. This understanding fundamentally changes how we think about a situation, and makes our ensuing actions far more likely to be effective.