Data Set You Free — Data and KPI for Software Product Manager

In one of his hallmark quarterly townhall meetings in Ford, Alan Mulally, then president and CEO of Ford Motor Company, was engaging Ford’s global employees, dealers, suppliers and other stakeholders. “Fact and data will set you free”, Mulally said again with his signature grin and firm conviction.

At that time, US economy was deep in the Great Recession of 2008–2009. Ford lost a record $14.6 billion for 2008, the worst annual result in its 105-year history. Ford barely skipped the bankruptcy and government rescue loan.

In that darkest moment, Mulally told the Ford employees: “Data Set You Free”. Throughout Mulally’s tenure in Ford, Mulally steadfastly insisted across the company to use data, not gut or subjective feelings, to make all decisions. In the end, Mulally and Ford team delivered the biggest turn-around in American corporate history.

At early stage, you may feel that data is not to set you free, but to confuse, overwhelm, manipulate you with all its mighty.

• Data is messy: data engineers spend 80% of their time on data cleansing. You really need to do a lot of data definition, governance, standardization to make it useful.
• Data has outliers: The outliers are differing from all other members of a particular group or data set, and indicating some special cases or edge scenarios. Statistics has some tools to manage the outliers, but interpretation and management of those outliers require solid…