Where To Start When You Have No Data

“We have to build this. Without it, we’ll lose customers.”

Ever heard that one? If you’re a Product Manager I’m sure you’ve had your fair share of leaders or stakeholders telling you something is a ‘must build’.

These ideas could be totally valid, but how do you know?

Have you talked to customers? Do you have data showing customers are trying to take this action? Have you already lost customers because you don’t have this feature/product?

You can’t make strong, scalable product decisions based on your gut. Not discounting intuition here and if you’ve worked on a product or in an industry for a long time, your gut is probably exceptionally trained to make good decisions.

But it’s important that a strong product decision, along with your gut, is backed up by data.

But what do you do if you have no data?

What? No data? How can you make a decision without data?

Now data comes in multiple forms but the one where you can get the most hung up is not having any quantitative numbers to prove something is increasing or decreasing performance of your product.