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Business Strategy Lessons for Data Analysts/Scientists With No Business Degrees
In this article, I want to share the lessons I learned from Growth IQ: Get Smarter About the Choices that Will Make or Break Your Business — a 2018 book by Tiffany Bova. I read it because I am a data analyst with a degree in physics — not business. Understanding how executives and managers strategize for the business is important as their plans require a cross-functional project that may involve the data teams.
Overview of the Book
The book is structured into 10 chapters, one chapter covers one growth path, which consists of “initiatives that can focus the company on the task at hand and achieve the strategic growth goal.”
Each chapter includes 3 real companies to illustrate ideas, implementations, and limitations of a given path. The list below shows the 10 paths covered.
Ch1: Customer Experience = improve current products and services
Ch2: Customer Base Penetration = sell more existing products to existing customers
Ch3: Market Acceleration = expand into new markets with existing products
Ch4: Product Expansion = sell new products to existing markets
Ch5: Customer and Product Diversification = sell new products to new customers
Ch6: Optimize Sales = streamline sales efforts to increase productivity
Ch7: Churn = retain more customers
Ch8: Partnerships = leverage third-party alliances, channels, and eco-systems
Ch9: Co-opetition = cooperate with a market or industry competitor (e.g. IP sharing)
Ch10: Unconventional Strategies = incorporate social cause into the business framework
Executing a strategic path requires knowledge of context, combination, and sequence. A company must know how the market context is changing (from socio-cultural, economic, and technological factors) and use it to its advantage.
To survive or hold years of business success, it should also have the correct combination (or set) of a few paths in the right sequence. For example, a company may implement the Optimize Sales path, then follow it with their…
