Ep. 35 | From Data Science to Data Storytelling
How do you move from just data science to data storytelling? In past episodes Chief Analytics Officers have told us this is one of the skills they value the most. In this episode host Allison Hartsoe speaks with Gulrez Khan, a data scientist at Microsoft who’s clever and charming fables open up the hearts of his audience so he can unfurl data insights to their minds.
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Speaker 1 – 00:00 – This episode is brought to you by Amazon Studios, a beautiful boy coming to theaters this fall based on the acclaim memoirs of Father and Son, David and Nic Sheff, Beautiful Boy chronicles, the heartbreaking and inspiring experience of addiction, relapse and recovery. Rolling Stone calls it an emotional powerhouse, too powerful to resist, impossible to forget, starring Steve Carell and Timoth�e Chalamet. Beautiful Boy is now playing in select theaters and opens nationwide November 9th, Rated R.
Allison Hartsoe – 00:32 – This is the Customer Equity Accelerator. If you are a marketing executive who wants to deliver bottom-line impact by identifying and connecting with revenue generating customers, then this is the show for you. I’m your host, Allison Hartsoe, CEO of Ambition Data. Each week I bring you the leaders behind the customer-centric revolution who share their expert advice. Are you ready to accelerate? Then let’s go!
Welcome, everyone. Today’s show is about how you move from data science to data storytelling and to help me discuss this topic is Gulrez Khan. Gulrez is a Senior Data Scientist at Microsoft. Gulrez, welcome to the show.
Gulrez Khan – 01:21 – Thank you. It’s good to be here Allison.
Allison Hartsoe – 01:24 – Can you tell us a little bit more about your background? I mean, no one actually starts as a data scientist. How did you get into data science and how were you drawn to the storytelling topic?
Gulrez Khan – 01:36 – Definitely, so I’m Gulrez Khan. I’m a Senior Data Scientist in Microsoft, and I’m working in the office division to be specific. I’m looking at on a ready, interesting new product called Microsoft stream. It’s like Youtube enterprises where you can create, manage and share the videos securely within your organization. As I’d be a scientist, I’m has been product managers taking decisions bound to water out of the next set of things we should be working on who have delighted customers and this involves lots of interesting other data scientists like defining the right metrics to focus on doing user segmentation. I didn’t define the DNA of a successful organization, so predicting which organizations are willing to be turned and many more, but the most important aspect of my work can tell stories with data because humans connect the most with the studio and the last I checked, we asked her to lead with humans at this point,
Allison Hartsoe – 02:44 – That is so true. I love what you said there, that humans connect the most with stories and uh, it, it does sometimes seem when we’re in the data space that it’s all day to day to data all day long. So tell me a little bit about why should I care about data storytelling? If my work is data science,
Gulrez Khan – 03:08 – So how many things like we all have been in those conference rooms, in those meetings you want to bloodied in the laptops and they’ve got this magical device in their hand called cellphones, that tweeting, tweeting, whatnot. How do you get that attention? So the audience decides in the full two minutes whether or not to pay attention to the presenter and you have gone just two minutes. The clock is ticking, tick, tick, tick. And if you just start with the boarding jargons, boating on the go to the homes, you would lose the audience later being. So always try to start with a story because a lot of words as we always do as data scientists, we spent a lot of time doing those data, massaging data, clean up and then applying the algorithm, and then we get excited that we have improved the accuracy of the model.
Gulrez Khan – 04:04 – Like what does that mean to a product manager who hardly understand the specific thing. So that’s what storytelling is really important. You want the engagement of the audience and the that’s where like you start with the student. And then the second principle that I use storytelling with data, I think they’re two different things. First is just getting the attention through a story or something. And then the second thing is when you are presenting the data, you presented in a form through some reviews so that, uh, within the already small in the audience and get the message right, what we are trying to deliver. And what I’ve seen is that as the data scientist we struggled with the communication. Most of the times its 30 minutes before the meeting sees that we are creating the powerpoint as a decent. So I think that’s not that I didn’t even know it was
Allison Hartsoe – 05:08 – that it I, I laughed because I have been there and I understand what that’s like 30 minutes before and you’re spending every last minute trying to find what’s the right way to communicate, but sometimes the right way to communicate is to connect, and that’s actually what we’re doing when we’re telling a story as we’re connecting to the hearts of our audience. Right,
Gulrez Khan – 05:29 – Exactly. Did you are? You are on holiday called Todd Davis. So I have a story about that.
Allison Hartsoe – 05:40 – Tell it, tell it.
Gulrez Khan – 05:41 – Yeah. So it was a time when I was reading the book and was hardly paying any attention at home. So why not was improving the satisfaction of our product in the next satisfaction at my group was going down, my wife and daughter. I’m happy with it, so I don’t do something to make them happy. And the, what I did is I said to them with the rest of my noodle network and have quality time with you guys listening to this, listening to this. My wife standing in the kitchen and she just, she gave me a back, and my daughter picks Theodore, and she yelled year, today we’re going to play with Lego, Lego. I thought I wanted to rest my neural network and I didn’t have any option with all right, bring it on. So she brought all these different colors, Lego’s. Reds, greens, blues, whites, yellows in all different shapes and sizes and I started being with it and I started doing the work that I do most all extract, transform load with all those Lego pieces and after spending 30 minutes with the Lego, but I had retaliation completely.
Gulrez Khan – 06:58 – The number one was an apple tree. The number two was my career so far, and the number three was the motivated and imagery, humor, a foreign surface product of Microsoft. By looking at it from my interventions, my daughter giggles like she laughed and then she asked me a question. Ba does this fall asleep on the sofa and do some money even in the park under the tree. So basically watching living far, she was grieving for the story. I had the three different pieces that I treated after doing all the easy things, but there was no connection. I just did it to my daughter here. These are for the different stuff that I eat it.
Allison Hartsoe – 07:45 – But she satisfied with that?
Gulrez Khan – 07:48 – I also see after that and then at first mothers spend so much time on it, why don’t you create any story you want and like I said, she would do it on, and she started creating a story, but how question kept coming back to me when I was working because the and this is what I was doing. I was doing all the data massaging, data cleaner, etc., and I was stuff, and I would put that in a dashboard and throw it at by business users are the product managers, and I had done them, Hey, I’ve done all this work and marriage, the jar to create any story that your wind down to the spirit in. So there was definitely a paragraph or analog connection that I saw, so that’s when I felt tired. Maybe I need to do something different to be able to tell a story.
Gulrez Khan – 08:41 – I need to go a step further, and that’s when I started using storytelling because to get the attention of the audience, uh, and then, uh, an of the principles of storytelling with data. I think that the SMT reviews, how to do you, you, you, you, your animation, there are different aspects, all these things. And that has in a, in a big van and even in my current project that I’m working on a Microsoft, what we do is we, clean comedian. So right now in my organization, whenever I am a, I’ve done any analysis or some work and I want to reach out to the audience, I would regard it as a video and shared it across because email’s not enough insight would go over there, and people might not have needed to be the other 1200 emails to go through.
Allison Hartsoe – 09:40 – So along that way, when you’re presenting a situation, are you architecting the story in the classic way of, you know, building to a climax with different characters, which I think would be different than if I was just taking you through a report.
Gulrez Khan – 09:59 – Exactly. So that’s like a that’s a very important piece of the story, what happens. Um, and I got an old story on it. Yeah, if you move. Yeah. So, so basically like the situation, like we described the situation. Yeah. So I was working in one of our product and the product that we had a lot of vanity metrics that our product team was looking into every day and with all the metrics like monthly active users feeds view thing. And my job as a data scientist was like the first look into all this data and then see what’s going on. Like uh, uh, what are the different types of from Netflix which people are looking at the spine and then come up with a metric that matters for our users. So what did that metric that could bring people back again to define it as retention? So what is the bank where it comes from?
Gulrez Khan – 11:05 – So that’s what I was trying to do and since it was kind of a change, a consider change. But our team I have can, I started with the story and the story goes likes this. So the story is about a King called in a very small town in India called that long. Not that long was the best man with big monsters, but the card he was famous all over the place, and he would often draw inspiration from his beautiful wife, Queen Rami. One fine day he was reciting his new plan to the Queen. And Queen was looking at him with all the love in her high and then suddenly something happens. The green started running at there. Then she started jumping, and now she’s standing on the chair. I was confused. He was supposedly what happened to that? She responded, Your Majesty. There’s a rat. That’s what a common problem in those days there were thousands and thousands of rats all over the city, but this time the king was angry.
Gulrez Khan – 12:24 – He said, let the message we sent out to the people that whoever gets to rat and bring it over, we’ll get $5. The news spread like fire every in every started hunting for rat left and right. A few weeks passed by when the king was still unhappy. The reason was good, the smell of all of those dead rat, people are bringing into the courtyard the year was less than what he would call it, the point of, for he signed another executive order. He says, you don’t have to bring the whole rat you can just get the tail of the leg and bring it to to get the volunteers, and that’s why it was happening and looking at the metrics. So this is where I make the connection with the metric. So looking at the metrics, what was happening was after one month people were killing 1000 rats every day.
Gulrez Khan – 13:22 – After two months they were 2000 rat like that. After six months there were $20,000 rats being killed every day. So looking at this metrics, it looks like the problem should be solved now or should be close to solving now, but be barely needed then to the original problem, and the King ordered and it, there were two observations. First of all, there was also a lesson that ruling all over the city. So people linger that they were just burned the deal of the rat and the, uh, getting bumpy. The second world, there was a budding industry of people reading that, so they wanted a $5 to kill the rat. We are bleeding rights, they are more relaxed now, so the offensive, the metric that you chose is a very important thing. It could lead to some unintended the incentives, so that’s what like the stories that I told and it was like the audience was able to connect it.
Gulrez Khan – 14:30 – They were laughing and now the ground. That’s when I started thinking about, hey, these are these vanity metrics that we are looking at this point and could they lead to some unintended incentives like the about the rats. So that was humor the, and then we vote with your feet, and there was a discussion that happened afterward. Instead, if I would have just gone had said that he. He lived in all these different metrics, would you have a with now I want to teach everything because my algorithms, this is a new metric that we should be looking into. It would have been a different response.
Allison Hartsoe – 15:15 – Absolutely. Oh my gosh. I love this example because you know what happened as, as I was listening to your story, I have to tell you within from minutes like zero to two, I was a bit skeptical. I was like, where’s he going with this story? What is this all about? But by minute to you had me and it was just like what you were saying when we talked at the beginning, it was just like what you said that there are a first two minutes where you have to grab someone’s attention, and suddenly at the second minute I actually cared what happened and then as you built on the story, I could see the connection coming, so it wasn’t so much distance that I couldn’t anticipate where you were going to go, but suddenly my mind is thinking, where are all the rat instances of metrics and now you’ve got this colorful answer, doubt that everybody understands and is probably amused by what a great success and it sounds like that’s what happened. Everybody was laughing and identifying those vanity metrics.
Gulrez Khan – 16:27 – Yeah. I’m. The important part is people live under these stories, so even now when we have these holiday discussion, after a few months, they talk about that when they talk about the second metric, they won’t refer the example. So this is a big expense that I feel the audience with the message which will be there with them. Instead. What happens is that a lot of things, you attend so many meetings in the office, how many of you have your member even the next day? And even when I ask you, so that’s the importance of the story. And uh, I think, uh, I, I’d been working on it, and there are a lot of people getting a lot of interesting stories, or maybe we should all learn from all these things. And you’ve got in your office, right? You don’t have to just think about to be with your friends. You can make an entertain your audience and do the work. As you could find.
Allison Hartsoe – 17:24 – And you know, one reason I, I particularly liked this topic is because in previous episodes on the show, we’ve talked with other people who are at the chief analytics officer level and they’re trying to get their message across and they’re working with data scientists and one of the things they routinely tell me is they value most highly to people, the team one, the person who can tell the story with the data who can make it relatable and to the one who can put the production schedules together so that the team is producing what the, what the organization needs in terms of the right data analysis. So this is incredibly strong and powerful, not just because you’re communicating but because it is having an impact in the organization.
Gulrez Khan – 18:16 – Exactly. So I’ve been in some of those conferences and discussion panel in the data science conference in Seattle. In a discussion panel. Someone was asking what is the most important thing as a data scientist that you guys do different topics we are discussing. But I think the most important thing that either data scientists, data scientists, if you want to do, learn to be able to tell students, learn to be able to simplify things and presented in a way that anyone can attend a, uh, understand that stuff that’s been super. And then the second principle is like storytelling with data, whether you use these different concepts because the attention span as we talked is whether later. So when I was talking about the story, this was the introduction, I’ve got your attention and now when I’m presenting the number,
Gulrez Khan – 19:14 – I used those tributes to tell the students like I can prevent all these colorful charts like the Lego structures, but I want you to pay attention to just a specific thing over, like imagine like on a stage. Then would focus your attention on one specific thing. That’s the battery. You can use these peer reviews like color, size, shape, orientation. All these different things to be able to tell a story which is the game becomes a prevailing political pain.
Allison Hartsoe – 19:49 – Got It. That makes sense. Do you think the story needs to be along the lines of a fable to not have to go such a long way to get a little nugget and fable is fairly compact and concise? Does it matter what kind of story you’re telling or what kind of model you pull from?
Gulrez Khan – 20:11 – Yeah, so it depends on the things as it depends on your personality as well. I think, um, you can tell her that is the interesting story about that you are excited about. So if, uh, I started talking about a different story that I’m not able to connect to myself. You’ll not see the emotions when I’m telling the story at the. I’m just talking about Star Trek when we went into talking about it, but personally I’m not as. I’m not a Star Trek Fan. No offense to anyone. I haven’t seen that really. So if I haven’t seen that movie and I just read about their time and be able to try to bend a study, I’m not able to convince to go with that, uh, uh, emotion. So you should always be telling stories about something that you can connect and be able to convey things with it and eventually everything boils down to the context that you are trying to deliver.
Gulrez Khan – 21:17 – So that’s what I have an I think we need to do. And again, as you said, have it necessarily doesn’t have to be a very long story. I don’t have to tell a whole movie will be able to connect, and I think, uh, I need to look more on that because I can try to warn about to the story and I’m less worried about, uh, uh, how, how fast you can deliver.
Allison Hartsoe – 21:44 – I have a very clear vision of your Gulrez. It’s, you’re sitting under an apple tree with the surface I thought. Okay. Do you have another example of the type of impact you’ve gotten from storytelling?
Gulrez Khan – 22:02 – So, yes, that was another example. So basically before working in the, in this product called Microsoft Skiing, I was working in a group called Worldwide Learning in Microsoft. Didn’t we create online courses which anyone can take MOOCs, massive open online courses which anyone can take from anywhere? And a course as opposed to the ethics. So basically what I was doing was we were looking at, we call it learning science, so, and I was using data science to work on this landing page and stuff. And what I wanted to show was I wanted to show that there are these different types of users. So when we talk about you, the segmentation, I wanted to say, okay, there are certain users who have got okay beginning and be able to do things differently or what, like the been who I started with the stories and I had this in, went off a conference in Chicago and this week it was like this, this was an again when I was spending too much time in the office.
Gulrez Khan – 23:19 – And my spouse was not very happy. Sometimes I’ll do something to make her happy. And this time what I did is I took her to a Bollywood movie called Dangal. So Dangal like wrestling. And in this case, it was about a character who would, uh, who was a wrestler. And we’ll go on to teach wrestling to his daughters in a very remote part of India. It was a good movie, and we had a good time, but the most important thing was my wife was not happy, and the next morning, uh, I can say goodbye and left off it, and I would have just borrowed my car in the office garage. That’s where I heard a buzz. It was my wife on Whatsapp. She sent me an image of the echo, as he ran through an amazing transformation, uh, to be a wrestler in the movie.
Gulrez Khan – 24:20 – So there were these two pictures like before and after if you could reach your life. And um, so that was a picture that she sent, but I knew what was coming next and I started all the the. So basically what, you’re trying to do was like, Hey, he could do it, you should also go to the gym.
Gulrez Khan – 24:41 – So that’s what I thought was coming back. And I thought, all right, let me look at it. And I’ve mustered all my knee and sent her a different image. And this image was again, our before and after conversion and the before and after everything was being. But uh, the only thing that got changed to a, in that one year with that guy was a, he had a watch, and before in and after picture, he didn’t have a watch so that I was using.
Allison Hartsoe – 25:17 – So he looked the same.
Gulrez Khan – 25:18 – Exactly. Yeah. Maybe like these are the different kinds of people who go to these amazing transformation, right? So what is, what are those things which will make some people to go to jail, uh, and then follow through those things and good with this amazing transformation and what a party like. I am not using the proper right now, but basically like what I did is I used the Google trends and what I saw was when I first for the gym, you would see a pizza which happens every first week of January, uh, every year. And that’s where people are searching for. So even if you go now go to Google trends. And so it’s for the gym, and you’ll see the trend every year you’ll top capital one, and it goes down. So these are people who are searching for a gym in the first week of January.
Gulrez Khan – 26:19 – And we are very excited about this thing that, hey, I want, I have got this new year’s resolution, and our loop go through this transformation when there’s just one thing that happened and then the most of us naturally don’t follow through. But there are these people like the actor that I was talking about who went through this amazing transformation and had this body transformed. And then what I did is after my discussion with my wife over the phone, I went into office and uh, I did, uh, I was doing my analysis and it was about the people who take our courses and what I see, well, IPS into the trend have any time when we launch off you can see a big jump, but if you can visualize, you’ve got x-axis which is the time and the y-axis, which is the little people are taking our courses.
Gulrez Khan – 27:16 – So whenever we launched our course, we see a big jump, like you’ll see a big peak happening. And then if it was very similar to what we were seeing, people who were looking for a gym, right? So it’s kind of a DNA of the pink, right? So there are people who do these amazing transformation and the gym similar to that, people will feel amazing transformation by taking the courses. Some of those people would go on and complete the course and do those things, but not everyone does that. So that was kind of storytelling that I started. And with that, I will be able to get a game, uh, the attention of the audience to laugh and I thought about different things. I talked about Ddl, uh, uh, users and I talked about DNA of the programs. So they are different programs that we are learning as part of my learning.
Gulrez Khan – 28:20 – And similar to that I had the analogy of people going to the gym and in the BNF people going to the gym and the DNA of the program that they’re participating in programs like 20, 20, 30, 20. So is it the DNA, the program into taking people to go through this transformation of the DNA of the individual as uh well similar to that, I was connecting. That is the DNA by users who go on taking the courses and completing it all is, it kind of would be an apple program. And then I had the data set, which I was referring to the data visualization, which we were, I wasn’t afraid to these different programs which are kind of for displaying and DNA Alpha program did on how many people started and completed in one time. So, so that, so that was another story that I was able to connect to the audience instead of just going directly and something. Uh, but, uh, the job guns, I’m a, I’m a go to those that don’t again have a good clip. Yep.
Allison Hartsoe – 29:30 – And, and in that story, again, you’re connecting to the heart first, and you’re connecting to the customer here that the user of the worldwide learning system. So you’ve, you’ve started, you’re actually connecting in multiple dimensions. So you’ve got the story, and you’re connecting to your audience, but you’re helping your audience see your customers and the DNA of those customers, which I think helps them release certain expectations such as everyone has to complete a course. If you make the analogy to the gym, then maybe they understand that hey, it’s okay if not everyone completes, but what is it that we’re trying to get people to do with this given program? Is that how the conversation kind of progress?
Gulrez Khan – 30:14 – Right, exactly. So even if you look now, like, uh, according to the stats, like five to seven percent of people actually couldn’t complete any courses that they’re taking. So that’s what a beaver is doing. And after that a discussion at the conference, lots of people, they came to me and they said that was a ready go the entomology because honor for us to go and participate in the gym, a lot of firsts that also go and participate in online programs to improve our skills but not ever even completed. So with that, like there was a connection, people were able to connect and then the ones could we have this connection? What I was just displaying through my data visualization technique was displaying DNA for success with the program. What is the DNA of a successful program looks like and how should the product managers use that DNA in the next set of programs that they are releasing?
Allison Hartsoe – 31:16 – Do you think that you have to be careful in picking that analogy and what if you had picked an analogy like cooking or something else that wasn’t as tight or might not have been, or it might’ve taken people down a heuristic path, a shortcut of thinking about things that might have been incorrect? How? How carefully do you have to be in your analogy picking?
Gulrez Khan – 31:39 – I, I think we need to be ready and at times like a few of mine and you thought to think about duties as I do like sometimes driving another thing. Sometimes it might not stick to the audience, so what one should do, I do is I try to you to show it to my advisor as she gets per year story. She’s an amazing coach, likes he looks at, and she provides all these different feedback. Hey, it doesn’t make sense at all. Like this is a bad joke that you’re using and all that. A different perspective. So that’s like she gets the first to collect, and then once I get her approval, then I tried to change things on that list. We do a couple of close friends and once would think that it’s a sense then, then that’s when I started practicing, like being an Intro, look, I’m not a person who talks a lot so I need to practice effective implant off my six-year-old daughter and to the extent that she the members come off the jokes or some of the stuff that I have in my talk
Gulrez Khan – 32:49 – So I think practicing and then getting some of the some of the approval of other maybe so from certain people is already important is how much time are we spending in communication? Right. So as we were discussing previously, it was just 30 minutes before the presentation. That’s when you were creating the slides are acknowledging it to 30 percent off. My pain is when was spending in communication, picking out the story, then working with my wife and have a few friends and then practicing it multiple times. People are actually going out to the audience.
Allison Hartsoe – 33:29 – So you said, I just want to come back to that. You said instead of spending 30 percent of your time in the preparation of the powerpoint deck; you’re spending 30 percent of your time thinking about how you will communicate the story? Which means that you’ve gotten through the powerpoint, you know what you want to say. You’re just looking for the most effective way to communicate it. So would you say this is an extra step that you know most people go through data analysis and don’t go far enough?
Gulrez Khan – 34:00 – Yes. So what most of us do as data scientists and analysts are the rejoined. Spent a lot of time in thinking about how would you communicate in thinking about who your audiences, because we spend so much time, you get excited about using all these algorithms and then massaging the. You got passionate about that. We think it’s the marketer’s job or someone else’s job to present, presented differently, but I think that’s a growth mindset. We want to be in level to be able to make an impact, and that’s when like, you don’t have to spend 30 minutes before the presentation to create the slides. You will spend more time like if you’re spending, um, if you have got a 100 percent to offer you, we’ll get the data scientists 30 percent off or something. What I spend on communication.
Allison Hartsoe – 34:57 – Excellent. That’s a great benchmark and I have to tell you, when I, when I spoke up at Microsoft, a guest back in June, uh, there was uh, a fairly large audience up there and I spent the night before with my nine-year-old son and going over the presentation and literally he fell asleep, and part of it and I thought, Oh gosh, I’ve got to work on the communication here. And I ended up flipping the presentation around because I couldn’t tell if he was bored. What does the audience gonna do?
Gulrez Khan – 35:31 – But I think that’s a great step. It was like you presented your son nine-year-old son and then like you practiced, practiced like it. You just don’t go and show up. So this is a great thing.
Allison Hartsoe – 35:45 – Yeah. Yeah. So, so tactically, like if I’m convinced today. I want to take three different steps here, or whatever the number of steps is, I think what I’ve heard you say is to start with the connectors and maybe. Well, actually why don’t I just put it to you. What would you say are your top tactical steps that someone should go through if they’ve decided they really want to be good at data storytelling?
Gulrez Khan – 36:15 – Yeah. So the number one thing that you need to think of it, what do you want? Your audience would have a right to think of all the stuff that you’re going to present things. What do you want them to take with them? Right? So that’s where everything is taught. And one of the first thing that I would start off after that is how I can engage the audience in the first two minutes? Because lots of meetings, people are busy, all that stuff. Uh, so think about the personal story that the audience will be able to connect, and you’d have to think of the different type of audience that you’re presenting to. And how much time you have like that’s also an important thing. So once you have that, uh, industry, but industry like that I was discussing earlier, he was talking with connected to the characters politically.
Gulrez Khan – 37:10 – So who does the studio about? So in my example, it was my wife and daughter that the section was, you’ve been in the situation, what’s going on with the situation is uploading the problem, I’m spending too much time at all and less time at home. So my satisfaction at home, going down then talk about how did you solve it and then comes the very important aspect of connecting it with the stuff that you are trying to deliver. For example, if we’re talking about a retention rate or something else or working with it to. So you tried to connect to the story, that thing and then comes from the fire of using visualization techniques. So you can tell stories with data. It’s how you use the um, so how you guys also like writing a comic book.
Gulrez Khan – 38:09 – So you know, very studios and canyons and you can, you have any mission, you can use text. So all that stuff, so have you seen, there’s a lot of things that they’re doing in storytelling and data policy with telling a story, how have you found this to ease in and then talk about the data, the data visualization principles, and then you, uh, you’ll have the engagement and hopefully you’ll be able to take into the last minute.
Allison Hartsoe – 38:43 – That’s a very powerful framework. Let’s, let’s start with a bit of a summary and see if I can get right back to your framework, see if I’ve missed anything along the way here. Um, but along the course of our conversation, we started with how do you get their attention and using that as the first place and that, that key is the first two minutes, if you use jargon, you’re, you’ve lost a and, and that’s what proofing in front of your wife or your child or your daughter can, can help, can help you get to a better communication strategy. But then you have to think about what are you going to get the audience to do? What is it that they, what action do you want them to take? And I think in many cases in data science where sometimes you know, we’re excited to find a nugget of information, but we don’t always take it all the way through until and now what, especially when it comes to the order of operations.
Allison Hartsoe – 39:49 – For example, your second story about the poet King, which was all about aligning incentives. So okay, I have this negative information, and I think there are some actions people should be taking based on it, but what is the second order of operation behind that? What is the incentive that’s driven behind that metric and then what’s the one behind that and kind of unpacking that? That leads to really great conversations, which again, you can queue up with a fable or a simple story to get into those conversations, but if you started with just the jargon and the metrics, you wouldn’t have connected with people’s heart. They wouldn’t care, and it’s hard to get to that level of engagement.
Gulrez Khan – 40:32 – We just kept it at a 50 event.
Allison Hartsoe – 40:36 – Good, good. Well, now girls, if there are people who want to talk to you more and want to get in touch and say, hey, I have this idea, what should I do? Uh is there a good way for people to reach you?
Gulrez Khan – 40:48 – Yes. So a lot of people are to through LinkedIn and make time for this bond as much as possible. So LinkedIn is a great way for people to reach out. Um, you can find me Gulrez Khan, and I think you can fly to the details in the show notes. That should be a good start.
Allison Hartsoe – 41:10 – Yeah, let me just clarify. It’s Gulrez Khan. G u l r e z. Khan, K h a n and uh, they’ll see you as the Data Scientist at Microsoft, and that should be enough narrowness to get somebody to you.
Gulrez Khan – 41:28 – Yeah, sure.
Allison Hartsoe – 41:29 – Good, good. Well, Gulrez, it’s been an absolute pleasure having you on the show today, and we will put everything that we discussed on the ambitiondata.com/podcast. I, I really liked your stories. They were so engaging and they even though you’re going through examples, I find myself thinking and then what happens to the king and then what happens to the wrestler. It’s a really charming approach, so thank you for sharing that with us.
Gulrez Khan – 41:58 – Sure. It’s been a pleasure to talk to you anytime.
Allison Hartsoe – 42:01 – Remember everyone, when you use your data effectively, and as we’ve talked about on this show when you communicated effectively, you can build customer equity. It is not magic. It’s just a very specific journey that you can follow to get results. Thank you for joining today’s show. This is your host, Allison Hartsoe, and I have two gifts for you. First, I’ve written a guide for the customer-centric CMO, which contains some of the best ideas from this podcast, and you can receive it right now. Simply text, ambitiondata, one word to 31996 and after you get that white paper, you’ll have the option for the second gift, which is to receive The Signal. Once a month. I put together a list of three to five things I’ve seen that represent customer equity signal, not noise, and believe me; there’s a lot of noise out there. Things I include could be smart tools. I’ve run across articles, I’ve shared cool statistics, or people and companies I think are making amazing progress as they build customer equity. I hope you enjoy the CMO guide and The Signal. See you next week on the Customer Equity Accelerator.