Sometimes, I just stare into dashboards to see if I can gain any insight. Insights are one of the major keys to growth, and they need to be handled very carefully. If you get the wrong insight, you can make really bad decisions pretty fast.
That is when the statistics part of the Growth teams kicks in. An important concept is looking at the whole picture.
Next time, when you’re looking at the session length metric, don’t look at only the average. What if you have one session that’s hours long and the rest are not over a minute? As that one particular session would increase the average, you’d get the wrong message.
That doesn’t mean you should leave that session out, but it’s a topic for another day. It means you should look at the whole picture. Check out the mode, the number that is most repeated in your dataset. Check out the median, the number in the middle once you sort from least to the greatest.
Then you will have a clear idea of your session length metric.
Look at the whole picture. See the whole picture.