Turning feedback into action

For twenty years, James's job was to make very large volumes of data usable by people who were not analysts. He owned a global insight platform at dunnhumby, with development teams across the US, UK and India and launches into Mexico and Turkey. Later, at the Post Office, he ran customer analytics, built a centre of excellence, won joint-venture funding for it and led a team of twelve.

He still gets his hands dirty when a problem warrants it. A convenience retailer needed to know what mattered to its customers, and to give six thousand product lines a category and a pricing strategy each, in time for a critical system launch that wasn't going to move. Half a billion rows of transaction data later, the Trading Director said it had looked very easy. It hadn't been. Looking easy is most of the job.

James learnt that reading people is harder than reading their data when, some years ago, a direct report expected something of him he wasn't giving (at least not in the way it was looked for from James). He found out too late to fix it easily, and left unchecked it would have cost the confidence of someone in their leader. The challenge was that different people on the same team needed different things from James, and no average would have told him which. Time spent in the same rooms as leadership coaches and Executive teams, has only served to reinforce that.

That conviction is also why Treehouse exists. Two decades of making customer data usable had given him a discipline the people side of organisations was still doing without. The gap came into focus during the pandemic, when how people work together turned out to matter at least as much as how their customers behave, and the tools for reading it were a decade behind the ones he knew. Two businesses can look identical from the outside and still need completely different things from the people inside them. Closing that distance is what Treehouse is for.

Phil has spent twenty five years in marketing and insight, on both sides of the table. He's been the agency, running client services and database marketing at direct and CRM agencies. And he's been the client, owning customer marketing at BSkyB and then insight at the Post Office. Seeing both gives you a unique lens into the decisioning, the pressures and the demands, and thus an understanding of what insight gets used, how it is consumed and by whom.

Take the Post Office. Thousands of branches, and almost no customer data telling any of them what to sell, or what to say where. The received wisdom was that sorting that out branch by branch was either too hard or not worth the effort. The analytics centre of excellence that Phil and James built took it on anyway. They didn't wait for perfect data. They built the picture up as they went, and kept it moving. It became 'right message, right place', working out which branches should sell which products, where to add weight, and where to send the field sales force. Fewer than one branch in ten accounted for the bulk of the applications. The branches they targeted went on to roughly double the rest. The board wanted a story, not a spreadsheet. That's still the job.

That's how Phil works: start with the decision, not the dataset. It's the same instinct that led him and James to conceive and build the tool that became AURA, designed from the outset to connect what people say to the metrics and the strategy behind them, so a leadership team gets the how as well as the what, not a transcript and a dashboard to make sense of themselves.

That's the conviction behind Treehouse too: clients shouldn't need an analyst on staff to use their own people data, they need someone who's already done that work for them. Phil and James run it as a partnership, bringing in specialists for the work they don't do themselves. He'd rather get a rough, useful answer in front of people this month and sharpen it from there than land a perfect one too late.