3 tricks to convince people using Data
Practical examples by former Engineering Director at Google
Have you ever had a “But I showed them the data!!!” moment?
Maybe you are a staff engineer who put together that careful pitch explaining how the database optimization project would improve the app latency by 38 seconds.
Perhaps you are a manager who tried to explain with a well-curated developer-hours tracker that your new project needs 2 additional developers to launch on time.
You could even be that junior engineer aspiring for a senior promotion with a line in your promotion packet calling out how your just-launched features increased active users by 4%.
The common thread in all those stories is that they were “But I showed them the data!!!” moments. The staff engineer’s project was shelved, the manager was denied the additional developers and the junior developer’s promotion did not happen.
Despite showing the data!
Making Numbers Count by Chip Heath and Karla Starr is the book for you if you’ve ever been in these situations.
The book provides excellent principles to make numerical communication impactful for many audiences. This is a must-read for techies because in our industry, backing claims with data is highly encouraged yet many such claims fall flat because they are missing additional communication scaffolding.
Today we’ll cover the 3 main principles of the book, with practical examples for my career at Google:
Translation
Emotion
Attention
Some parts of the article are direct quotes from the book, all the credit goes to Chip Heath and Karla Starr.
I’m Chaitali, an avid reader,
fan and author of . Thanks to Anton for inviting me to be a guest author here.
1. Translation
As a staff engineer, I used this principle to strengthen my infrastructure project proposal so it’d hold its own when stacked against other feature development work in the org-wide planning process. The pitch was to my director who had an org size of 100 developers at the time.
Before: This project will save us an estimated 8,000 SWE-hours.
After: This project will give back 80 hours, the equivalent of 2 work weeks, to each of our developers in perpetuity.
The quickest route to having people understand your number is to start with something simple, a well-understood part of the overall scene: 1 employee, citizen, or student. 1 business, marriage, or classroom. 1 deal, game, or day. Focus on 1 concrete chunk of an experience: 1 prototypical visit, 1 day, 1 month in the quarter. If that very simple setup makes your point, declare victory! You can end there.
People think that a bigger number is always better to drive home your point. In reality, it can have the opposite effect, as it feels less personal and “real”.
2. Emotion
As an engineering manager, I used this principle to successfully motivate my team (12 engineers at the time) to adopt healthier bug hygiene which led to better customer experiences.
Before: Our bug backlog has 973 P2 bugs that nobody has looked at for 5+ years!
After: If each of you chooses to fix just two P2 bugs a week for the next year, not counting holidays and vacations, we will be all done with our long-standing P2 backlog and you can claim credit for excellent bug hygiene AND amazing customer experiences!
We’ve been thinking about ourselves our whole lives. So if a new piece of info has something to do with us, it will be more easily and thoroughly processed.
A great example from the book:
Before: 40% of U.S. adults do not always wash their hands after using the bathroom at home.
After: 2 out of every 5 people you shake hands with may not have washed their hands between using the toilet and touching your hands.
Did you imagine that in your head and felt a bit disgusted? That’s exactly the goal!
3. Attention
When life doesn’t match our predictions, we experience the most marvelous attention-grabbing treatment on Earth: surprise. Offering a surprising number will make it count. But as we’ve seen, audiences have diverse backgrounds and expectations. To break a rule as cleanly as a karate master breaks a board, first you’ve got to set it up. We will call this technique “crystallize-break”—you have to first crystallize an idea in someone’s mind before you can surprise them by breaking the expectation.
We don’t see the hero fight the bad guy until the bad guy has won a few matches. We aren’t impressed with the third little pig’s brick house until the first two get their houses blown down.
During Steve Jobs’ speech introducing the Macbook Air, he first started out by discussing the Sony TZ series. He showed the below diagram to crystallize in his audience’s mind what “thin” looked like for the existing competitors.
After he crystallized the existing idea of “thin”, he broke it with the below image showing the Macbook Air’s thickness in teal.
He ended his introduction with the punchline. “And I want to point something out to you. The thickest part of the MacBook Air is still thinner than the thinnest part of the TZ.”
Here is how I used this principle in one of my promotion packets to showcase how unusual my organization was then.
Crystallize → The company’s expected annual regretted attrition rate is 3-5% in a stable organization.
Break → My organization’s annual regretted attrition rate was less than 1%.
Punchline → This rate was maintained even as the organization rapidly grew 15x over the past year.
Final words
Here is a quote from the book epilogue that captures the sentiment of this book very well:
We believe the world becomes a better place when we use numbers more often and more wisely. Counter to conventional practice, that probably won’t involve squeezing more statistics on a page. In fact, it will often mean using fewer digits but with more impact.
We believe in numbers not as background, not as decorations, but as central points, with profound stories to tell.
We believe in numbers, deeply. We believe in making them count.
What we enjoyed reading this week
Thanks
for a great guest article! I have a feeling you are going to see some more appearances from her in our newsletter :)Learning Environments - What to look for when evaluating your potential new team by
- . John recently started to write articles that cover the ‘juicy’ stuff in tech. I really enjoy it!
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Love that you covered this book! I'm not all the way through, but have tried to pick up many of these tricks.
Also, I think Anton used one of them in his recent "How I have 27 hours in a day" article. There's a lot of ways to say that one:
- "How I was able to watch 3 more netflix shows each day" -> relatable and something you can visualize
- "How I saved 3 hours per day" -> more boring compared to 27 hours a day. With 27 hours its like, "wait, that's not even possible? how?"
Would love a part 2 of this post! There's plenty more tricks to talk about
Loved the concise article and the precise examples, Chaitali and Anton.
Keep it coming. "Making Numbers count" is on my Reading list after reading your post.
Single biggest takeaway for me is:
"People think that a bigger number is always better to drive home your point. In reality, it can have the opposite effect, as it feels less personal and “real”."
Counter-intuitive but real.