Show me the data

I was speaking to a member of our team last week. He had a really great point about how we should be doing something that I totally agreed with. So, I told him to go back to the drawing board and convince me. What!

As an organization grows, there are more people involved. Even at the senior level.  Only a few months ago we had 3 senior management members, 3 more board members, and 4 board observers.  Since our series B investment, we have another 5 people involved in these decisions.  Each additional person exponentially increases the risk of your argument being derailed by speculation or opinion.  So use data. I've been trying to present my cases with more clear and concise data that backs up my intuition.  This becomes more and more important as people join the company.

As we've adopted this data focused decision making approach, I've noticed a subtle and disturbing trend:  opinions being presented as empirical evidence.  The statement "The users would feel very good about this feature"  is a long way from "We tested 10 users and they all felt very good about this feature".   Speculation about user behavior is not the same thing as actual data about user behavior!   I recommend usertesting.com to test integration features before they go live.  I've also started investigating userfly.com for live site video sampling

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