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

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 ...Read More

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 come ...Read More

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 ...Read More

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 famo ...Read More