For the last decade, "Big Data" has been the corporate religion. We built data lakes, hired data scientists, and collected petabytes of telemetry.
The promise was that if we just gathered enough dots, a magical AI would connect them and reveal the future.
The reality? Most companies are drowning in data but starving for insight.
The Signal-to-Noise Problem
More data doesn't essentially mean better decisions. In fact, it often leads to analysis paralysis. When you have 500 columns in your dashboard, you can find a correlation to support any decision you want to make.
Big Data is great for optimizing ad clicks or predicting machine failure. But for strategic decisions—launching a new product, entering a new market, pivoting a business model—Big Data is often too slow and too noisy.
The Power of "Small Data"
"Small Data" is data that is actionable, accessible, and understandable by humans. It’s the kind of data that fits on a Napkin.
- Talking to 10 customers directly gives you more qualitative insight than analyzing the clickstream of 10,000.
- Watching a single user struggle with your checkout flow reveals more bugs than a week of server logs.
Small Data focuses on causation, not just correlation. It tells you why something is happening, not just that it is happening.
Heuristics Over Algorithms
In high-stakes, uncertain environments (like a startup or a turnaround), complex models often fail because historical data doesn't predict the future.
Instead, successful leaders use heuristics—simple rules of thumb derived from "Small Data" observations.
- Jeff Bezos: "If you double the number of experiments you do per year you’re going to double your inventiveness."
- The 80/20 Rule: 80% of your revenue comes from 20% of your customers.
These aren't derived from a neural network. They are derived from observation and logic.
Start Small
Before you invest another million in a data warehouse, ask yourself:
- Do we know who our best customer is?
- Do we know why they buy from us?
- Do we know why they leave?
If you can't answer these with a simple sentence, no amount of SQL will save you. Go talk to a customer. That’s the Small Data that matters.