Balance data with intuition

Does being "data-driven" mean ignoring human intuition? Absolutely not. The misinterpretation of "data-driven" as "data-only" leads many teams astray. Data excels at answering "what" questions: What are users doing? What features get most engagement? However, data frequently falls short on "why" questions that require human interpretation and domain expertise. This is where intuition becomes essential.

The ideal approach creates a cycle between these complementary forces. Use data to identify opportunities and challenge assumptions, while applying intuition to generate hypotheses and interpret unexpected results. Consider how this might work: imagine a music streaming app notices an unusual pattern where users repeatedly play short segments of songs. Data alone might suggest optimizing for this behavior, but human intuition could hypothesize that users are trying to learn lyrics. This intuitive leap could lead to developing a lyrics feature, something the data revealed as an opportunity but required human interpretation to understand the underlying user need.