Every year at the PFMI, I teach a class about data. It’s a scripted show honed over almost a decade’s worth of learning and experience of working with data. If a student walks out with anything, I want it to be this: Data analysis starts with questions, not data.

You can take any data set available, apply all sorts of wonderful tools, and get information. But did you learn what you set out to learn?

Asking the right questions will let you know whether you have the right data, and whether that data has the information you seek.

Imagine you’re looking at last year’s sales data. It’s showing you the most popular products you sold, where you sold them, how much revenue and cost and margin came from each product family, all sorts of good and useful information.

If you asked the question “What were our top sellers and who bought them?”, you would probably get a complete answer.

What if I asked this question:

“What products did those customers buy that you didn’t sell them?”

Now that’s an interesting question, and probably the one we should be trying to answer. It leads to opportunity, and shared growth with your market. And that information isn’t in the data set you’ve got in front of you.

Because what you really wanted to see wasn’t visible.

The process is simple: Good Questions help you find the right data. Analyzing the right data brings you useful information. Useful information drives smart decisions and tells you the actual things you need to do.