Should product management decisions be data-driven or more so data-informed? Should Product Managers lead with intuition and use data to back up their assumptions?

Product management decisions should ideally be data-informed rather than purely data-driven. Being data-informed means leveraging data to guide and support decision-making, while also acknowledging the context, the subtleties of customer behavior, and the broader market trends that quantitative data might not fully capture. Data is invaluable for validating hypotheses, understanding user behavior, and measuring performance against goals. However, it's equally important to recognize the limitatio ...Read More

I have a strong bias towards data-informed approach over a data-driven approach as I believe that data is just one of the many inputs that product manager needs to consider for decision making. There will also be many situations where you will need to make decisions when data isn't available or it's imperfect. In some of these situations, you may not have the choice to wait for data to become available. So, you need to be able to leverage your intuition to make decisions and keep making progress ...Read More

The answer to this question falls in the category of "it depends" :) Let me give a few examples where different approaches would help drive the decision making. Example 1: You are trying to build a new solution/product that has no precedent within the company In this example, you would need to use data to make the business case, however you would also need to make some assumptions around adoption, relevance to customer verticals and likely competitive analysis to guide the narrative. This is an ...Read More

Data should be used to inform product management decisions rather than drive them. A product manager should lead with intuition and use data to support their assumptions. Data should be used to inform decisions, but it should not be the only factor in making decisions. It is important for product managers to use their experience to make informed decisions, and then to use data to validate those decisions.  Data can provide insight into: customer needs market trends and product performance  It ca ...Read More

While intuition serves as a valuable starting point for Product Managers, particularly those well-versed in their field, market dynamics, and customer preferences, relying solely on intuition can lead to biases and blind spots. Product Managers may become overly attached to their ideas, making it challenging to pivot or abandon unsuccessful pursuits. Data serves as a crucial tool in validating assumptions and guiding decision-making. However, it's essential to recognize that data can be manipula ...Read More

The ongoing debate between data-driven decision-making and being data-informed continues to captivate the product management community. From my personal experience, data has always served as a powerful tool in navigating the intricacies of decision-making, particularly in overcoming the challenges of indecisiveness. This holds true regardless of whether the product is targeted towards B2B or B2C markets. However, it is important to acknowledge that relying exclusively on data may not always resu ...Read More