Paul Moore

Director of Data Insights, Yahoo

The core message of Paul’s talk was to be DATA driven. In his mind, the key to a successful business was understanding the data of how users actually use your product. In order to do this well, you must use all tools available:

- logs

- availability and response time

-usability

-analytics

-mixed method research

-scaleable customer experience management solution

Yahoo generates roughly 10TB of data every day, and has 4 Petabytes of collected data!

Once you have the data, the trick is to be flexible enough as an organization to adapt to the insights gained. Interestingly, Paul suggested that you are better off overstaffing for flexibility. This way you are ready for growth and won’t be caught by surprise if you are successful. You should organize for capacity, resource allocation and decision making. I’m skeptical as to how applicable this is for a startup, as keeping costs low is a crucial priority and doesn’t mesh that well with overstaffing, but the need for flexibility is certainly real whether big or small.