I knew before I knew

Do we have to choose between data and intuition to make good decisions?

I trust my gut a lot. No, I don’t think I have a special gift that I was born with either.

For me, gut feeling is mostly pattern recognition. After years of product work, and probably because of how my ADHD brain is wired, I often notice signals and connections before I can fully explain them.

Something feels off, and I just know. A small detail catches my attention in a way I can’t immediately articulate. Everything looks fine on paper, but something nags at me.

Similarly, sometimes I just know something is worth paying attention to. There’s no clear connection to desired outcomes or anything measurable yet, but I can see the value before it becomes measurable and impactful. Eventually it does, and then everybody sees it too.

I don’t believe it’s intuition in a spiritual sense. I think it’s just accumulated experience making it easier for me to match the situation with previous situations and their consequences.

That doesn’t mean my gut feeling is always right. Of course, I can still be wrong.

I still want data. I still want evidence. I just don’t believe every decision has to start with numbers and percentages. Sometimes it starts with a feeling, and then we can (and should) still use data to figure out whether that feeling is actually pointing to something real.

The two aren’t opposites. Data without judgment is just an observation. And judgment without data is just a feeling.

So no, I don’t think gut feeling is an alternative to being metric-driven. I think it’s often what tells you which metrics to go look at in the first place.

In one of my previous articles, I wrote about how Google Image Search was born after an unexpected spike in searches for Jennifer Lopez’s green Versace dress. As I mentioned there, sometimes you notice users need something, or are trying to do something, that your metrics don’t yet capture.

“As much as metrics are important for measuring success, at the same time, they can be backward-looking if you’re not careful. They measure performance within the current frame. When user behavior begins to stretch beyond that frame, legacy metrics might underrepresent the opportunity.”

― Ipek Kavuzlu, The decisions you can’t defend with data

Sometimes you keep working on something because you can already see its value, even though that value doesn’t fit neatly into your current understanding of what success looks like.

Some things are worth pursuing before you fully understand where they might lead. That’s all it is.