Data Storytelling: Present insights like a Pixar film

Stop overwhelming people with numbers. Start with the takeaway.

Photo by Klaas on Unsplash

This guide aims to help designers, product managers, and data scientists pitch data-driven ideas. Write stories that convey a clear takeaway, without overwhelming people with numbers. Prevent data paralysis.

Let’s assume that dozens of data points have been pulled as part of an exploratory analysis. Perhaps to assess impact of a product change, to estimate the value of a new market opportunity, or to guide a Go, No-Go decision. Insights are littered all over the place.

So what’s next? How do we synthesize all these insights? How do we go from dozens of plots to “Go, No-Go” decisions?

Common Data Analysis Process

1- Craft a storyline

Toy Story 3 cost ~$200M to make. Not cheap. So before the team invests in building 3D models, composing music, and hiring actors, they storyboard. The entire film is planned by sketching potential shots, re-working them, and getting the storyline just right. So only the necessary animations are produced. Nothing more.

Photo by Matt Popovich on Unsplash

Designers, product managers, and data scientists can also leverage storyboards. They can help visualize user experiences and draft analysis stories. They allow us to see the big picture, organize plot points, and add/remove insights to better convey ideas. It prevents us from wasting time investigating hypotheses that don’t matter or creating beautiful charts that won’t be used. It serves as a plan for our analysis write-up.

Instead of sketches, analysis storyboards are made from takeaway statements. These takeaways are written by reviewing each data point from our exploratory analysis and asking: So what? What is the data telling us? What action does it empower? What does it explain?

This leads to takeaway statements that look like:

• Opportunity to ___