Is Data always good for Decision-Making in Product Management?
The motley of Intuitions, Visions and Data
In today’s product development zeitgeist, data is king. Everyone professes of data driven decision making.
Successful products are shipped after data analytics, A/B Testing and quantitative techniques. In fact, all product & business managers across industries are taught to NEVER ASSUME anything during decision-making.
But a contrarian and cogent view also suggest that data may NOT ALWAYS be helpful.
Context of Product Launch / Management:
Some of the initial best features on which products are launched were conceived by worldly experience, empathy and a vision. Many products have been originated without any data points to support their success.
Would have Elon Musk created Tesla after looking historical General Motors & Mercedes-Benz electric cars sales in early 2000s?
Would have Steve Jobs created iPhone after studying dismissal performances & popularity of touch-screen devices of 1990s?
Would have Reliance created Jio Telecom after analyzing debt ridden balance sheets of telecom players and saturated market?
Surely the above examples would seem like extreme exceptional cases but there are surely numerous undocumented stories where Product / Business Managers took decisions based upon their experiences, customer engagements, empathy, vision and intuition and not just through a metric dashboard on Tableau or Power BI.
Well no denying that data is important, but the key is
WHEN & HOW to use data?
Experts say that data based decision making should be practiced when data is
· Available
· Correct
· Incrementally Optimized
Sometimes a new direction, a new proposition or a feature is not testable, measurable or provable through data simply because there is no precedence to it.
Decision-Making Tool Kit
One needs to have great intuition — empathy — customer understanding and a great product sense that serve as great tools in creating that successful product feature or line of business.
The below is a model that can be utilized to practice effective and objective decision making.
Remember, Data is just one tool in your Decision Making Took Kit. Ensure you have other tools and you use them too in your product mindset.
