What is data-driven? Lessons from Dreams

In this episode of Datadrivet, Joni Lindgren and Jasmin Yaya are joined by Kathleen Asjes, Head of Research and Insights at the fintech company Dreams, to work out what being data-driven really means in practice.

The question they keep circling is a simple one: every day we all work on different things, but how do we know we’re working on the right things, and that they’ll have real impact? Kathleen’s answer is research that combines the quantitative with the qualitative rather than leaning on one or the other.

Dreams helps people save money toward goals using automated rules it calls spar-hacks. The example the episode makes concrete is “Tjuven,” the Thief, which quietly pulls small amounts from the user each week. The user doesn’t know exactly when or how much, and over time the savings stack up. It’s a clean illustration of designing for real behaviour instead of what people say they’ll do.

Kathleen describes how her team actually works. They run user interviews, analyse product data, and even draw on neuroscience research into saving behaviour, using the PingPong tool for user testing. Over one summer the team worked intensively on mapping the full customer journey. The questions driving the work are practical: what do users do, what happens in the app, why do people save short-term, and which spar-hack is the most popular.

The part worth stealing is how the insights travel. The team runs weekly sessions to share what they’ve learned, which keeps busting myths about the users and the product before those myths turn into wasted roadmap. Data-driven, in this telling, is less about dashboards and more about a steady habit of checking your assumptions against what people really do.

The takeaway: being data-driven means pairing the numbers with the why behind them, then sharing what you learn often enough that the whole team stops guessing.

Listen to the full episode of Datadrivet for Kathleen’s full account of how Dreams runs its research.