Once upon a time, during the dawn of the internet era, early web products often came from college dudes. The dudes were almost always wealthy and well

The Oxymoron of “Data-Driven Innovation”

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2021-08-02 17:00:08

Once upon a time, during the dawn of the internet era, early web products often came from college dudes. The dudes were almost always wealthy and well-connected, but they weren’t usually market-savvy.

Look: I’m as concerned about survivorship bias in drawing conclusions from these interviews as you are. But one thing stands out. Asked how they got started, they all go “I was playing around and made a thing I wanted to use. Other people liked it. That was literally it.”

Today’s product development wants to be “data-driven.” The focus is on quantitative methods to find product-market fit, usually by way of interviewing people who use the product, or interviewing people who represent majority groups that the org would like to see using the product. (Or, if we’re brutally honest, attempting to triangulate info about one of these two groups from product surveillance data).

Today’s product managers contrast their data-driven approach with the “I built this for me” approach we heard in interviews with founders from the 1990s. Despite its empirical strategic success, “build for yourself” now gets cast as immature and shortsighted.

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