How to Write Insights That Inspire Action

Find the output from your team's last completed experiment. Does it state what was learned? Does it explain why the result occurred? Does it connect the finding to a business objective? Does it recommend what the team should do next? If it does all four, your team writes insights. If it does one or two, your team writes findings. Findings describe what happened. Insights explain what it means and point toward action.

The Four Components

Every insight has four components.

1. The observation. Specific numbers, context, and source.

Checkpoint: Look at the last insight your team produced. Does the observation include specific numbers and a source? Or is it a general statement?

2. The explanation. Why is this happening? Draw on multiple data sources.

Checkpoint: When your team writes an explanation for a result, do they reference evidence from multiple sources? And when they reference previous findings, can they actually find them?

3. The implication. What does this mean for the business?

4. The recommendation. What should the team consider doing?

Checkpoint: Look at your team's last three experiment summaries. How many include a specific recommendation that connects to a business objective?

How to Write Them

Start with the 'so what'. Write for the decision-maker, not the analyst. One insight per entry. Connect to what exists.

Checkpoint: If someone on your team needed to find 'everything we know about mobile checkout friction', how would they do it?

Checkpoint: Could you name the three most relevant past experiments and what they found? Could a new team member do the same without asking you?

What Good Looks Like

The writing method is straightforward: observation, explanation, implication, recommendation. The question is whether your programme's insights are structured, stored, and connected in a way that makes them findable and buildable, or whether they exist as paragraphs in decks that nobody will search.