Building product sense by being data informed, not data driven

There are few phrases that get thrown around as much as the necessity to become data driven. It stems from the desire of building organizations and products more objectively. That's a good thing. Data moves us away from making products on the back of intuition and feeling, but it is delusional to think that subjectiveness can be filtered out entirely. Product development is an inherently subjective endeavor, even with all our efforts of trying to quantify it with data. The best product decisions happen at the intersection of both. And that intersection has a name: product sense.

So why am I writing something about two phrases - being data driven and data informed - that are essentially identicial?

Isn't is it just semantics?

No. On the surface these two phrases may sound like a synonym, but there is a very glaring nuance: A almost blind trust in data as a single source of truth vs. using data as a key variable among other important indicators.

Being compelled by data can damage the product downstream

Data can tell you what is happening, but not necessarily why it is happening. I have worked together with a lot of journalists - and one thing that was always a surefire way to increase digital engagment was to use clickbait titles or catchy thumbnails. When we experimented with this, the user signals were very clear: We were getting a lot more people onto the platform, but at the price of engagement and a high bounce rate. But much more: Our teams always decided against increasing this practice due to the long-term effects this would have on the brand and perceived trustworthiness.

This applies to the domain of search as well. The most clicked result may just have a enticing thumbnail, and may not actually be the most relevant result at all. Understanding the behavior that is behind the data-curtain is the essence of acting data informed.

Getting lost in the data

A set of metrics cannot fully represent what you value. Teams preaching a pure data driven mindset are doing themselves a disservice. I have seen this mindset lead to a very poisonous "if we can't measure it, then we can't do it" mentality. I have also seen teams drown in data a optimize at a feature level, losing sight of a cohesive product experience. You also miss trends you would have seen if you looked at the world around you instead if keeping your blinders set on what the numbers say.

Product sense is what fills the gap

There is a quality difference inside the product management role that is hard to articulate but easy to recognize. And it is not about data literacy. Most product managers have that. It is about knowing what the data isn't telling you. About having a intuitive understanding of the custsomer, even if that is a story data isn't telling or may even be contradicted by the data.

The journalists I worked with who made the best long-term product decisions weren't the ones who trusted the data most. They were the ones who understood their audience deeply enough to know where a short-term metric would lead two
years down the road. That is product sense: an accumulated, thorough understanding of your customer. How they think, what they actually need, what they will and won't tolerate. This is built from years of listening and being wrong.

Being a data-driven PM may have been a USP at some point . Nowadays, data is the floor. Product sense is what you build above it. The best product decisions I have seen were made by people who knew their customers well enough to trust something the data could not see.