Katie Bauer!

The hard part about this is that companies already have systems of meaning-making, even if they're informal, and whoever currently drives this system may not be interested in having a DS team come in with a perspective that contradicts their carefully crafted narrative.

If you find yourself in this situation, it's important to remember you're on the same team as this narrative creator. You work for the same company and both want it to be successful, even if you have different ideas about how to make that happen.

So learn about how they see things and be willing to learn to speak their language. Putting your work in a context they already understand will make you more comprehensible and get you more buy-in and trust.

This might feel like giving in, but it's actually making you part of the existing knowledge creation process. If you do your job well, more people will understand where you're coming from and what you do, and you'll be able to play a bigger role in knowledge creation over time

If you must deliver Insights, treat them like modular pieces of context that can be plugged into your company's shared understanding of how things work. Treat them like tools for figuring out what's going on and what to do next.

Would be awesome to hear what you’d consider to be a best-in-class example of this

Sure. Cohorting users (or whatever your unit of analysis is) is a pretty classic example. Good segmentation turns one ill-defined problem into several smaller more tractable problems, and it gives you a basis for asking deeper questions.

Xfn folks usually have some intuition for why people use your product, so it's crucial to put quantitative bounds around those use cases and make it possible to segment for users who do those things specifically. That's an example of plugging into an existing system of knowledge