Okay, so I'm in a bit of a tricky spot and could really use some advice from people who've been here before.
My boss is a big fan of "data-driven decisions," which is usually great. We've been testing a new project management SaaS platform on a free team trial for the last month. The vendor's dashboard shows some crazy-good metrics: "47% increase in tasks completed" and "team collaboration up 32%." My boss saw these and is basically ready to sign the annual contract.
Here's my problem: I think those numbers are super misleading. The "increase in tasks completed" is mostly because we were all creating dummy tasks to test features, and the "collaboration" metric just counts @-mentions and comments, which we were spamming to see how notifications worked. It was a testing phase, not our real workflow.
How do I present this to my boss without sounding like I'm just being negative or resisting change? I want to be cautious here. I'm worried if we buy based on these trial stats, we'll get hit with a huge invoice for a tool that doesn't actually fit our real, messy, non-demo project pace.
Has anyone had to deconstruct a vendor's trial analytics before? What worked? Did you set up your own internal tracking for the trial period to compare, or is there a better way to frame this conversation? I don't want to throw the tool under the bus entirely—it might still be good—but the justification feels off.