Chase the product, not the data

Pavel Samsonov wrote this great thing about how Nike got bit by chasing the data instead of making a better product:

It’s tempting to reach only for the data that’s easiest to harvest, and stop there. That’s exactly what Nike did with their online shopping data. As a result, their product priorities rapidly diverged from the kind of things ordinary customers buy, while product with mass appeal rotted in warehouses for lack of places to sell it. And the longer Nike chased these fringe customers, the more ordinary shoppers moved on to a competitor’s product.

And and and:

The value of research doesn’t come from elevating people who are already shouting. It comes from finding the people who are not being heard, and adding their voices to the conversation.

Here’s the painful truth: a lotta folks point at the data because they can’t see the product. They don’t use it, they don’t have feelings about it. They don’t sit there and obsess over the details like what happens when you click X or whether something should live on this page or that. And there’s no real incentive for them to do so! In many organizations it doesn’t matter if the product gets better, so long as the weird garbage kaleidoscope that we call “data” gets better.

Anyway:

You can only build a great product if you care more for the vibes than for the data.