Being Data-Driven is irresponsible — Confessions of an obsessively logical Product Manager
The other day I spent my morning hours answering questions for a potential job prospect. Most of the questions were straightforward until I landed on the classic behavioral question of “Mistakes & Failures”.
The question was as follows: Describe your biggest success as a Product Manager, and your biggest failure. Share details about the situation and how you handled it.
For the purpose, of this blog post, I’ll be particularly speaking here about the part of the “failure” and how it was tied to a poor understanding of using data as a primary decision driver.
I’d like to clarify here that I don’t like to use the word failure with a negative connotation. I consider any such experience as a lesson learned.
After all, we learn more from failure than we do from success.
So now to the main point: Initially, I was going to answer this question by connecting it to some product management-related task or decision that I had to take.
But there is something that a lot of us product managers (and many other professionals) don’t realize; it’s that being in that space for a while begins to seep in and mold how you think in your everyday life.
With that said, I chose to talk about a more personal story of how using pure data as a decision-maker screwed me over.
The Story Of “Garbage In, Garbage Out”
A few years back I had to decide whether or not to join a startup. Without too much detail, I will summarize and say that it was a major decision, and should I accept it, it would affect my career in the years to come.
The decision wasn’t so black and white, had many pros and cons, and there were way too many factors that I had to examine before concluding what I needed to do.
At the time I also experienced what they call “shiny object syndrome” and the offer, to me, looked like the cat’s pajamas! I couldn’t see the problems clearly, nor ask the obvious question: “why is this cat wearing pajamas in the first place?”
To top things off, I had one week to give the startup my life-changing decision.
After a few days of giving it some thought, I couldn’t really wrap my head around whether I was making the right choice. This decision had too many moving parts and was entangled with many emotions. I eventually began to fall into “paralysis by analysis”.
At the time in my career, I personally identified as a rationally minded person and thought that it was wrong involving emotions in major decisions. My thinking then was Logic > Emotions.
In hindsight, that type of thinking was immature.
“But wait, isn’t being emotional when making a decision immature and taking an emotion-free and rational approach more mature?”
Well, what if I told you that there’s no such thing as a purely rational decision?
Previously, I tinkered with an idea of an e-commerce search engine that leverages AI to conclude with high probability (within a narrow search category) what item you will end up buying.
Here’s where it gets complicated: It turns out that even if the customer goes the long route by scrolling through hundreds of items and doing research only to end up with the same search result delivered by the AI, to some degree that experience was necessary. The process the customer goes through is not just logical but highly emotional.
I learned a valuable lesson from that project: No matter how you go about it you simply cannot make any decisions in the absence of emotion.
You can see this at play in the work of a famous neurologist Antonio Damasio who studied a patient named Elliott. Elliott suffered from a tumor in his frontal lobe. After removing the tumor, the surgery was deemed to be a success but only for a short time. They discovered that Elliot hadn’t lost any of his abilities except for one, his ability to experience emotions.
You would think that Elliot became an uber rational person never led astray by those “silly” feelings. But you’d be dead wrong!
Elliot’s life was very difficult. He would spend long hours deciding what to eat or spend up to 30 mins picking between a red pen or a blue pen just to fill out a simple form.
Dr. Damasio went on to write his seminal work describing how emotions and decisions are intrinsically intertwined. To put it simply, If we were to make a decision and rely on reason alone we would have to analyze a never-ending list of variables.
Human beings have evolved to use emotion as a shortcut for decision-making. Sometimes that thing you call your gut or instinct is actually an emotion nudging you in the right direction: Making life a lot more efficient to navigate.
Therefore in my case, it was quite irresponsible to neglect myself from the decision-making process.
Nevertheless, I decided to completely outsource the decision to logic and numbers on an excel sheet to analyze each component and its risk.
I went with a framework that looked like this:
Basically, I turned different risk factors into weight-based decisions in order to give me a concrete Yes / No result.
The Result: To put it lightly, I screwed myself.
☝🏻Side Note: Let’s, for a moment, completely disregard the fact that the whole thing was a poor man’s attempt at “data translated into decisions”. For one, there were many factors of great importance that were left out and should’ve been factored in. The results on just one of those factors could have completely skewed the result one way or the other.
But it’s not the framework in question here.
It is the fact that even with all the so-called logic I employed, my gut instinct and intuition were telling me the opposite to what the data showed.
Today, many of our frameworks and thinking approaches are encouraged to be data-driven and neglect any human factors like emotions. What I ended up with was only as good as the data I fed it and it didn’t serve me well in the long term.
The term “garbage in garbage out” applies quite well here. The conclusion I got from this data was quite garbage, if I’m being honest, and the decision I made wasn’t the best.
It was a bitter pill to swallow and as time went by I made the best of it.
The Lesson: Evolving my frameworks from being Data-Driven to Data➡Informed.
🤔What changed?
▸ Being rationally motivated by practicality and charged by my love for Excel sheets, facts and figures led me to believe in data-driven information to the point of obsession. Cold hard analysis 100% of the time doesn’t leave any room for romance–it puts the brake on potential and possibilities that lie outside of the safe zone of the data. It is a double-edged sword that can make you more risk-averse or feed your cognitive bias.
▸ Even though I knew in my heart, Frameworks are is only as good as the data information you feed them. On some level, I knew this deep down but wasn’t listening to that voice. Therefore, I learned new ways to understand myself better, identify my biases, and approach important decisions much more holistically with emotion.
▸ I’ve expanded my mental model (not just in theory but in practice) to a more holistic one. I also find it now important to actively research the topic of Intuition, how you know it’s true, and when can you trust it. (There’s a lot to say about this particular topic with some fascinating findings on how tapping into that leads to better life decisions and outcomes. I won’t elaborate about it here, but let me know in the comments if you’d like me to talk more about this. I’d love to hear your thoughts)
This seemingly bad decision led to a lot of better things in my life in ways of thinking, personal growth, and professionalism. In a sense, you can say that I evolved into a superior version of myself.
And I’m super grateful for it.
Tl;dr: Believed that being data-driven and highly logical is the best way of approaching problems; Took a decision; went full logical and eliminated emotion from the equation; screwed myself in the process. I grew from it and completely shifted my mode of thinking to become more in touch with my intuition and understand the important role that emotions play in decision making.
Signing off,
