How Dreams spreads insights across the org

In this episode of Datadrivet, Joni Lindgren and Jasmin Yaya talk with Kathleen Asjes, Head of Research and Insights at the fintech company Dreams, about getting research out of a slide deck and into the hands of every product team.

Dreams helps people save money and reach their goals through savings-hacks, automated rules tied to a savings goal. One example is “Tjuven” (The Thief), which quietly pulls a small amount aside each week without the user knowing exactly when or how much. Kathleen and Joni worked together earlier at Schibsted, and they share a way of working: pull toward common goals and prioritize hard.

Kathleen’s Research and Insights team combines quantitative and qualitative work to feed insights to product teams. When she joined Dreams, she started by asking colleagues what they needed to know and what was holding them back. The same questions kept coming up: what do users do, what do they do in the app, why do they save short-term, and which savings-hack is most popular.

To answer them properly, the team spent last summer building a complete customer journey. They grounded it in three sources: user interviews, product data, and neuroscience research on saving behavior. For user testing they used PingPong. The piece that makes it stick is rhythm. Weekly insight-sharing sessions put findings in front of the wider organization and, in the process, knock down myths people hold about the users and the product.

The takeaway is that insight only changes decisions when it travels. A shared customer journey gives teams one picture, and a weekly cadence keeps that picture in front of them.

Listen to the full episode of Datadrivet for how Kathleen built the function and ran the sessions.