Convincing case studies

I’ve been rethinking my approach to case studies. Here are some guiding principles I’ve been sticking to:

• Avoid writing about X,000% increases—they sound bullshit (even if they’re not). We’re all so inured to inflated statistics that most people will gloss over big percentage increases. Smaller, more “realistic” statistics are–counterintuitively–more persuasive.
• If you extract yourself, and your company, from a case study, it should still offer something innately valuable to the reader: a lesson learned, a framework to apply, a process to use. Connect the events back to some larger, generalisable “thing” that every reader can use to their advantage. The payoff needs to be more than “wow, this company is smart!”
• The customer is the hero, you are the sidekick. Companies will hire you (or buy your product) to realise their own goals and ambitions. You are not the hero of a case study–you are the sidekick in their hero story. No matter your level of involvement in a big win, your job is to position yourself as the enabler of another company’s success—after all, that’s why new readers will want to hire you.
• Make yourself an active participant in the story. You might not be the hero, but you should still have a visible role in the story. Talk about the people involved, the questions you asked, the decisions you made, the lightbulb moments and the mistakes, and position yourself as a peer, not a subordinate. Sidekicks aren’t heroes, but they still matter.
• Stories are just as valid as data. Cold, hard performance data is great, but so are stories of challenges faced and problems solved, anxieties confronted and lessons learned. Not every worthwhile success story will have amazing data to accompany it—so don’t limit yourself to just “data-driven” case studies. Paraphrasing advice I got from Walter: “We won for a customer. I think that’s pretty amazing.”