Data vs Intuition
A question from this newsletter’s mailbag (yes you can email me) recently piqued my interest - a reader asked whether their answer to my “data vs intuition” WMT interview question passed the sniff test. I’m copy/pasting the original question and rationale below:
“walk me through a product trade-off where the data in your hands vs the intuition in your head didn’t jive, and how you made sense of it”
from this I can learn:
what level of trade-offs you have made
if you use data and to what degree
do you over-rely on data to guide
how you build / refine product instinct
if you follow curiosity or index on delivery
The reader’s answer was sometimes you see a data point that seems too good to be true, and talking to customers can provide the context to gauge whether it is or isn’t. I ask this question in phone screens pretty regularly, and it’s pretty common to hear an example where the internal metrics dashboard and the external customer voice are the source of the tension. One of the reasons I li…
