3 visualizations that changed my life
I’d like to share 3 stories with you. 3 encounters that changed my life thanks to simple visualizations that help me tell better stories every day. I’ve been fortunate to meet many inspiring leaders over the years and I’ve been secretly watching how they do things, how they craft strategies, and tell stories with data. Here are 3 things that I probably use at least once a week.
Please, don’t forget that these tips are just the tip of the iceberg. Few times I heard stuff like “let’s train a neural network model based on raw ads impression data that will automatically create smart…”, you get the gist. But if you were to ask about stuff like CLV (customer lifetime value), ARPU (average revenue per user), CAC (customer acquisition costs) vs. CLV, and few other metrics, no one knew how they were doing. I believe that everything should start with the fundamentals like key metrics, unit economics, objectives, and once you have a strong core, you can build on top of that.
Let’s get into it.
I love waterfalls
Well, also the ones like in Yosemite Falls (that we visited with my partner during our US road trip), but today I’ll show you a different kind.
In the past, when we were presenting our goals (to investors) and how we were going to reach them, it was more like scraps and pieces. One initiative here, one initiative there. I believe that presenting it as a simple waterfall chart helps you tell a powerful story — where we are, where we want to be, and how are we going to get there. You have it all in one simple picture that everyone understands and you can just focus more on the WHY.
With this visual, we have a clear objective in front of us and we can also visualize our progress, in the same way, to periodically check on our performance along the way. And when we dive our heads too deep into day-to-day business, we can just get back to this picture to refresh our minds and see a bigger picture.
I really like how it sets things into perspective and you can add more context with short notes/highlights. You can also nicely shape the perspective by showing a contribution of a specific team or a person to the objective.
Another use case might be unit economics, you can pretty neatly show how the revenue nicely builds up and how the costs cut it down. In the example below, it’s just the revenue (ARPU) part visualized.
You can also read more about our whole P&L in a separate article.
I have to thank Renata Salata for the waterfalls, before I met her, I never used it to present objectives or unit economics in this simple, yet powerful way. I also have to thank Ondřej Vejdovec for polishing them and making them tell a better story on every occasion.
Will it blend, ehm, break-even?
When will this cohort (or a customer segment) break-even? A tough question which we usually answered with a spreadsheet with our customer cohort data. Until the day I saw this lovely visualization for the first time.
It tells you how the revenue & costs (cumulatively) develop month by month and with one line in the middle, it tells you exactly when did you break even. In the example above, you could see how all the customers acquired in 2017 behave. I believe that it can help you understand your customer lifetime value better and also present it as a story.
You can also compare different customer segments, cohorts, campaigns, or whatever you would like. It can also nicely show the unit economics development over time.
Here’s a slightly redacted version pulled directly from our Tableau that shows you how for example our Apple Pay users differ from the rest of the portfolio. It tells an interesting story.
For this simple visual I have to thank the guys from Enern, now KAYA VC (Tomáš Pačinda & Jakub Stračina).
And what’s your strategy?
This is my team’s strategy for the next quarter. You can straight-away see what are the 4 building blocks for us, how we believe we are doing right now, and where we want to get. It might seem simple but it actually summarizes a lot of our thinking that we can communicate in a simple way to other teams at Twisto. I think it’s easy to get lost in the details when you handle a lot of different projects and priorities but this one visual forces me to clear my thoughts and make them more succinct.
As for the scale of “how are we doing”, I’m just simply rating different areas as “we are doing like 6/10 and we want to move to be 8/10”, no rocket (or data) science here. You can see a few underlying areas for all aspects of the strategy (like data warehouse, documentation, etc.) that I also rate individually to get to the final mark.
The second example comes from our Monetization strategy. Again, you can see the building blocks/drivers, where are we now, and where the biggest opportunities lie. I feel like this one could possibly make it as an NFT art piece, just kidding (or not if you would be interested). It’s a bit more complex but it summarizes a lot of different business cases and opportunities.
As for this last visual, I have to thank Bonami’s CEO Pavel Vopařil. It was powerful to see how the long-term strategy of the whole company can be so simply described.
With great power comes great responsibility
I would say that the most important thing about these 3 visualizations is that they force me to clean up my thoughts and escape from day-to-day projects and all the priorities. They force me to distill my thoughts and get from 30 concurrent initiatives to just 3 or 5 building blocks. It’s something I can always get back to and see the bigger picture.
Maybe, sometimes I spend too much time thinking about which visual to pick but at the end of the day, I believe that this choice matters as it helps you communicate things clearly to everyone around you. And that goes for all visualization tasks, I always play around to see what portrays the story I want to tell the best.
And of course, the foundation is good and solid data, architecture, and tools (in this order). Without these things in place, you could be causing havoc by spreading things that are based on faulty insights.
As Spider-man once said:
With simple and powerful visualizations comes great responsibility
(or something along those lines, right?). Good visualizations need quality data/insights with limited noise and biases. You can’t avoid biases and messy data in 100% of the cases and I believe that it’s your responsibility to connect the data with the vision/story you are trying to tell.
That’s it for today, thank you for reading this far! I hope it will help you tell more powerful stories and add context to your slides. And thanks to all of you who contributed to my toolbox over the past years (not just the ones mentioned here).
Please, let me know if you found these tips helpful and what should I write about next time! Do you also have few tools that you frequently use? I’m super curious to see/hear more about them, please ping me in the comments or in a DM (me@lukashurych.cz). See you next time.
