> After that experience, my view of metrics-driven product development is that it's a way to offload the burden of thinking too hard or understanding where you'

> After that experience, my view of metrics-driven product development is that it's a way to offload the burden of thinking too hard or understanding where you're going. When people talk about metrics-driven product development, I think of drivers who blindly follow their GPS' directions into a lake. There's also the flip side - metrics-driven development used to keep other people from thinking too hard and scrutinizing work. At my last company, many product decisions were justified using a litany of metrics including AB tests, which people just swallowed because "the data speaks for itself!" I once took a look at the app we were using to run the AB tests and not a single one had reached statistical significance. The company was basing its decisions on data considered garbage even by the AB app's naive p-value algorithm. I thought that after dozens of A/B tests at least one would be statistically significant just by dumb luck but no, not a single test had even the veneer of credibility.