The Product Side

A single number says nothing

Yesterday I came across an ant. It weighted 1 gram. It was so light I could hardly feel it on my palm!

What do you think about that?

Not much, I guess. An ant weight of 1 gram does not mean anything to you, because you do not have something to compare it against.

Ants weigh between 1–5 milligrams (mg), so an ant weighing 1g means it would be 200x — 1000x times fatter than its typical sibling! Imagine meeting a human who weighs 20 tonnes!

Don’t worry, I am as clueless as you regarding ants (actually regarding many things).

The point is that a single number says nothing if you have not something to compare it against. Let’s have some more examples:

• My son’s height is 131cm. → Is he tall or not? We all know that this depends on his age.
• Our company made €12mil revenues in 2020. → Really? How much did you make in 2019? What was your forecast for 2020?
• We have 10K monthly active users in our platform. → How many did you have last year? What percentage of them are daily active users? What is the market / population that you are addressing? How are your competitors doing?
• I got a raise that was 2x the inflation rate! → Well, if the inflation rate is 0,8% (EU rate for 2020), then a 1,6% raise is not that much.
• Using this medicine, your risk of a heart attack is reduced by 36% (the infamous Lipitor case). → Yes the risk is reduced by 36%, but actually this difference comes from having a 3% chance of having a heart attack without the medicine vs a 2% chance of having a heart attack when taking the medicine. The actual difference is just 1% — negligible.
• Bitcoin price is $20.000! → back in Dec-2017, when bitcoin reached this price, we all thought that BTC was to the moon! Now (Jun-2021), if it goes that low, everyone will start shouting about the collapse of Bitcoin, considering it was $60K a few months ago.

The list can go on for ever.

The key point is that whenever you are presented with a number, please ask for at least another one, in order to put it into context.

Let’s end this post with a smile.

If you want to impress your mates, here are some fun facts with numbers :-)