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I think this phenomena is less about PMs and more about a "data driven" culture. I worked at a mobile game development company for a couple years. While the in

I think this phenomena is less about PMs and more about a "data driven" culture. I worked at a mobile game development company for a couple years. While the industry was young, they had some really big hits and grew to be mid sized. While I wasn't there for that era, talking to the people that were, it was mostly driven by passion and people that cared about games, and while they monetized well it wasn't the focus. However, they had a couple of misses after those hits. This is pretty normal in game development, although in my opinion those misses were mostly about being too ambitious: way too much tech requiring cutting edge phones, tools that were still not mature, team sizes that were larger than they knew how to handle, etc. So, the founders stepped down, and they were replaced with a new C-level staff that came from the gambling industry, mainly slot machines. These people LOVED the numbers, KPIs and all that jazz. They loved showing those numbers to the staff too, which credit for being transparent but realistically a group of creatives are not generally that interested. The problem was, since every decision required "data", innovation became impossible. Have a cool idea out of left field nobodies done but everyone is excited about? Can't be done, where's the data? But we can make a match 3 with a familiar IP! Who cares that we're just copying the market leaders and entering the space once its already saturated. Anyway, the company folded two or so years after that. It was a shame because there was a ton of talent there, but the C level management just did not understand the industry, how to get creatives excited, and they did not care about games. They just had "data"

Terr_ 3y ago
> since every decision required "data", innovation became impossible. That makes me think of this quote about the "McNamara Fallacy" [0]: > But when the McNamara discipline is applied too literally, the first step is to measure whatever can be easily measured. The second step is to disregard that which can't easily be measured or given a quantitative value. The third step is to presume that what can't be measured easily really isn't important. The fo[u]rth step is to say that what can't be easily measured really doesn't exist. This is suicide. Or, for a punchier meme approach, this SMBC comic [1]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy [1] https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/rise-of-the-machines https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/rise-of-the-machines
Nathanba 3y ago
yes one of the most frustrating things is to deal with people who come in and ask for data to support an idea. You suddenly have to justify common sense and good ideas to people who don't have any data for their ideas either but they'll certainly push their ideas first before any data has landed. After all you have to develop something, you can't just do nothing. And then later you do a survey on what they ended up doing without any data and naturally the thing that was visible got selected. People very rarely look at something and say: "well this entire product you developed is just garbage." Take the netflix ui for example, I'm sure they did plenty of surveys. Or the Google+ ui or the Windows Metro Phone. And yet it's not human to expect the surveyed to say that this is all bad and redesign it all from the ground up. A human being when asked for specifics will give specifics of some kind and then they will fix those specifics and think that it's all better now. I mean it's all absurd. Knowing what feature or design to implement is not really easy to do based on data. By the time you can gather data you already had to implement designs, ideas etc to a quite advanced degree. Data is very useful but it certainly can't be used for new product or feature development until you already developed them. At which point the data is already old and you have to make decisions about the future again.

Terr_ 3y ago

> since every decision required "data", innovation became impossible. That makes me think of this quote about the "McNamara Fallacy" [0]: > But when the McNamara discipline is applied too literally, the first step is to measure whatever can be easily measured. The second step is to disregard that which can't easily be measured or given a quantitative value. The third step is to presume that what can't be measured easily really isn't important. The fo[u]rth step is to say that what can't be easily measured really doesn't exist. This is suicide. Or, for a punchier meme approach, this SMBC comic [1]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy [1] https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/rise-of-the-machines https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/rise-of-the-machines

Nathanba 3y ago

yes one of the most frustrating things is to deal with people who come in and ask for data to support an idea. You suddenly have to justify common sense and good ideas to people who don't have any data for their ideas either but they'll certainly push their ideas first before any data has landed. After all you have to develop something, you can't just do nothing. And then later you do a survey on what they ended up doing without any data and naturally the thing that was visible got selected. People very rarely look at something and say: "well this entire product you developed is just garbage." Take the netflix ui for example, I'm sure they did plenty of surveys. Or the Google+ ui or the Windows Metro Phone. And yet it's not human to expect the surveyed to say that this is all bad and redesign it all from the ground up. A human being when asked for specifics will give specifics of some kind and then they will fix those specifics and think that it's all better now. I mean it's all absurd. Knowing what feature or design to implement is not really easy to do based on data. By the time you can gather data you already had to implement designs, ideas etc to a quite advanced degree. Data is very useful but it certainly can't be used for new product or feature development until you already developed them. At which point the data is already old and you have to make decisions about the future again.