How much of your product design is data driven based on product marketing learnings and experimentation vs trusting the word of the designer?

Data is a great place to start. It helps to identify which hypotheses have the most promise and to prioritize where to dig in. Designers can have great intuition about what customers want and how to build it. However, when it comes to product design, particularly for something new, data can't always tell the full story about how customers actually react and behave and it’s risky to lie on intuition of an individual team member.

Experimentation is crucial and that can take many forms when it comes to product and marketing. Getting early prototypes into the hands of customers to hear their raw feedback and see reactions can be incredibly enlightening. Running small alphas or betas and observing real customer behavior and utilization is a promising indicator of future behavior. As a result, much of product design can be based on learning from real customers and experimenting for optimal outcomes.

At Square, the product development functions all work really collaboratively and share a customer-driven approach. This means that product designers, product managers and product marketers are all providing data and insights about the audience, and then collaborate on product/feature discovery to ensure alignment on the problem we’re trying to solve (which typically all ends up in the PRD). This helps ensure that design starts with a bounty of insights and learnings, which is then supported with testing through development. This can either be in the form of usertesting interviews to get feedback on new designs or workflows, feedback captured during alpha or beta from customers, or a live A/B test at launch.

We have never quantified this, but I will say that we always start with assumptions (i.e., “the work of the designer”). But then we go on to validate (or disprove) and further iterate on those assumptions with what PMM uncovers from customer data.

I come to every collaboration with the assumption that the designer I’m partnering with cares deeply about the usage of her design. I have a degree in design, and I can tell you that user-centric design is at the core of any formal training. World famous designers such as Tim Brown have inspired designers all over the world with concepts such as Design Thinking, which has shaped the ideal approach for product design. Therefore, I’m trusting that she’s keenly aware of the value of customer insights. So, in my mind, “trusting the designer” and “marketing learnings” will likely have some overlap. For what it's worth, most designers I’ve worked with are eager and excited to see insights from customers. 🙂

If your designer isn't using any kind of data as an input into their design choices, then I'm not sure I'd feel comfortable just "trusting their word" for it. Start by asking your product designer how they make design choices. Ask about what data they use, if any. Maybe they are using adequate data as input but they haven't done a great job making their process known internally. If they aren't, I'd absolutely campaign to change that.

Product marketing learnings (quantitative or qualitative) are great inputs, along with customer feedback, behavioral data (ie product usage), and of course, user testing. If you need to, build an ROI case for a simple user testing or session recording tool and send it their way.