What is data-driven? Lessons from Dreams

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. In this episode of Datadrivet, Joni Lindgren and Jasmin Yaya talk to Kathleen Asjes about how that works in practice. She is Head of Research and Insights at the fintech company Dreams.

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.

Dreams helps people save money toward goals with automated rules it calls spar-hacks. One of them is “Tjuven,” the Thief. It 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. Dreams designs for real behaviour instead of what people say they’ll do.

Kathleen’s team runs user interviews and analyses product data. They also draw on neuroscience research into saving behaviour, and they use the PingPong tool for user testing. Over one summer the team mapped 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?
• Which spar-hack is the most popular?

The habit worth stealing is the weekly session where the team shares what it has learned. It keeps busting myths about the users and the product before those myths turn into wasted roadmap.

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