The YouTube comment

Last week our garage door keypad stopped working. It’s one of those boxes that mount outside your garage and, with a four-digit code, opens your garage door. Very handy for foot traffic like kids coming home from school. The keypad was flashing all sorts of lights when you punched in the code, but the garage door didn’t budge.

I started with the owner's manual and attempted to resync the outside keypad with the garage door lift mounted on the ceiling of my garage. It’s a 6 step process to reset the code. One step is identifying an opener ID from a list of 12 different models, styles, and manufacturing dates listed. After staring at my model for a while, I guessed that my model was ID 4.

Then I walked through the steps to reset the keypad pin. Nothing. I tried again. And again. Each time I looked closer at the instructions unsure if I was misreading a key step.

By the 6th time, I pulled up YouTube. The most popular video was 2 minutes long and walked through the steps I had been doing (correctly). I was at a loss. And frustrated. I don’t have the time, energy, or patience for this (mostly patience).

Then I glanced at the top-voted comment below the video.

“If you have a yellow button then your model ID is 12”.

I could have hugged that commentor (Thanks, yezwhat87! You are a true hero).

I went through the steps again using ID 8 and it worked perfectly.

Here’s the thing.

Your leaders are swimming in information. Inundated with data, content, opinions, perspectives, and instructions. They have crucial responsibilities. And they don’t have the time, patience, or energy to mine through potential permutations or potential scenarios to predict results. They can’t scour the spreadsheets and dashboards looking for a crucial piece of information.

They need the key piece of data. Pinned as the top comment.

That’s the job of a data team. To deliver the right data, at the right moment, in the right way.

Just like YouTube commenter yezwhat87!

Sawyer

from ​The Data Shop