Building product & the facts about gut feelings

I love gut feelings because it’s someone synthesising a lot of inputs and getting to the point where they feel “hang on, something’s going on here”. I love this because the human brain is an awesome information crunching, pattern spotting machine! We may not understand how it works, or why we have a hunch, spidey senses or a feeling in our gut but we should definitely trust it more.

Data and facts, however, are what help us to discover what is really going on beneath those spidey senses.

Now some people live in a world of facts and analysis and only trust hard data. Some people are guided more by instinct and their gut. Some people are somewhere in the middle.

When you’re a product company, your front line is your gut. Your CS team are talking to customers every day, collecting thousands of data points. They are feeling the vibe of things and every now and then their spidey senses go off. Something is going on and it’s not quite right, but it’s hard to put your finger on it. So you flag it to the technical team. Perhaps you sense a trend in customer sentiment or churn. Perhaps things feel slower.Now engineering lives in data land, they like facts and proof, and this is where the gap between instinct and fact becomes a problem.

One side is saying they feel something is wrong, and the other is asking, where are the facts?

So then what often happens is those with the gut feeling, knowing that an engineer wants facts, find the most obvious data to validate their feeling and try and use that as the proof, to be helpful. But they are time poor, they have 100 calls to answer and so selection bias comes into play and the easy data they find may look like it supports their gut feeling, but it is actually wrong or flawed. So then when an engineer looks at it, the data doesn’t actually back it up, or perhaps a selection bias is apparent so they feel like CS are trying to game the system to get their thing seen to. The problem they say exists, it seems, does not really exist.

Frustration sets in. It feels like no one is listening or cares. Sometimes we stop reporting the hunches because, well, what’s the point?

Here is where we — product teams and engineering, get it wrong; we spot where the data presented is flawed or not demonstrating the issue and we dismiss or downplay the issue because of a lack of or flawed evidence. This is a natural response when you value facts and data.

Here is what we should do better; we should work with those with the instinct to find better evidence — together. We need to say “Hmm these numbers are a false positive, but I believe you are right about this so let’s keep digging”.

What we value is their intuition and the impact this can make with the help of some deep spelunking into the why.

We need to channel a bit more Jessica Fletcher, Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot. “Now that IS a mystery. The game’s afoot!”

Using intuition to feel out problems and opportunities, and data and analysis to solve them is incredibly powerful combo but uses very different brains and we often get it all wrong because we just don’t understand how the other half live and think.