Building Data Literacy at Starbucks

An organization will not change unless its leader really wants it to. If leaders are not willing to tell their teams that using data to make decisions is important and incentivize people who are actually using data to make decisions, then change won’t happen. You'll get the early adopters and no one else because everyone else is busy with their jobs as they are. So, we do go for a bit of the low-hanging fruit when it comes to the teams we work with because we need to invest in the right places where we think we're going to have an impact.

We have erred on the side of being as close as possible to the short-term business objectives. If we can improve people's work this week, then we're really happy. Let's say you're in marketing and you have three marketing dashboards but you only use one. We can introduce you to the other two, talk about the concepts very briefly, and get you using them. We want to work toward actually having a crew of people that want more. We want more advocates asking harder questions of our analytics and insights team.