This standard ensures that product and engineering decisions are grounded in live, reliable data—enabling teams to prioritise effectively, validate assumptions, and adapt with confidence.
Aligned to our "Data-Driven Decision-Making" policy, this standard strengthens accountability, improves responsiveness, and reduces risk. Without it, teams operate on guesswork, slowing progress and increasing the chance of misaligned outcomes.
| Category | Description |
|---|---|
| People & Culture | Decisions are made through intuition, anecdotes, or HiPPO (highest paid person’s opinion). |
| Process & Governance | No requirement for evidence-based decisions. Assumptions are rarely validated. |
| Technology & Tools | Live data sources are not accessible or are siloed. Tools do not support real-time visibility. |
| Measurement & Metrics | No standardised decision-support metrics. Impact of decisions is not measured. |
| Category | Description |
|---|---|
| People & Culture | Teams begin consulting some data before decisions, but usage is ad hoc and inconsistent. |
| Process & Governance | Guidance exists to consider data during planning, but follow-through is variable. |
| Technology & Tools | Dashboards or reports provide some useful metrics, but often delayed or incomplete. |
| Measurement & Metrics | Key metrics are reviewed occasionally, not routinely tied to product or technical decisions. |
| Category | Description |
|---|---|
| People & Culture | Teams use shared data sources and common metrics to guide most decisions. |
| Process & Governance | A standard process exists to review live data before approving or changing plans. |
| Technology & Tools | Data pipelines and telemetry tools feed into planning, delivery, and retrospectives. |
| Measurement & Metrics | Impact metrics are tracked and linked to decisions, supporting accountability and learning. |
| Category | Description |
|---|---|
| People & Culture | Data fluency is a valued skill across product and engineering teams. |
| Process & Governance | Decisions are regularly evaluated based on historical and predicted outcomes. |
| Technology & Tools | Real-time data informs continuous prioritisation and scenario modelling. |
| Measurement & Metrics | Data quality and usage are tracked; metrics are benchmarked and used to improve decision models. |
| Category | Description |
|---|---|
| People & Culture | Teams proactively seek out new signals and refine decision-making through data experiments. |
| Process & Governance | Feedback loops ensure data-driven insights continuously improve decision quality. |
| Technology & Tools | Observability, usage analytics, and forecasting tools are fully embedded into decision systems. |
| Measurement & Metrics | Strategic and operational metrics are integrated, allowing fast, high-confidence decisions. |