Serve the decision-maker's job, not the general report
General insight reports get filed. Reports built around a decision someone has to make get used.
3rd December 2023
Most insight teams publish too many general reports. A monthly round-up of viewing figures, a quarterly tracker deck, a dashboard of everything. They're accurate, and they're ignored, because none of them helps a particular person do a particular job.
Jobs theory, which Simon Miller set out for audiences in a talk at AudienceCON, says customers hire products to get a job done. It works just as well inside a company. Decision-makers hire insight to get a job done too. So the question for an insight team is which jobs matter most to the business, and which of those its current work serves badly. The wider the gap between how important a job is and how well it's served, the bigger the opportunity.
Television makes it concrete. The same viewing data serves very different jobs:
- Growing the audience for a new show needs preferences and behaviour, tied to choices about characters, storyline and marketing.
- Choosing which markets or platforms to distribute to needs audience potential compared region by region and service by service.
- Fixing the schedule of a linear channel needs to know where viewers drop off and how they flow from one programme to the next.
- Pricing advertising on a new digital product needs rates on comparable platforms, set against the new product's own audience.
- Building a data strategy needs an honest audit of what data the organisation captures and uses, and where the gaps are.
A general viewing report touches all five and answers none. A report built for one of them can end in a recommendation.
Working this way also tells a team what to stop. Data collected for no job, and reports written for no decision-maker, can go.
The idea has only got more current. At the TMRE Insights Executive Retreat in Denver in October 2026, one theme ran from the morning into the closing proposals: "Start with the decision, not the method". The notes from the day put the advice in one line: "Put the decision, deadline and definition of success at the top of every brief, and the method at the bottom."
What to do on Monday
- List your team's regular reports. Next to each, write the decision it informs and the person who makes it. Anything left blank is a candidate to stop.
- Ask your three most important decision-makers what they're trying to get done this year, not what data they want.
- Rewrite your brief template so the decision comes first and the method last.
Related service: Steer