Balancing Data and Gut Feel in Product Management

I’ve been mulling over a classic product manager dilemma: go by data or gut feel? If you’ve ever found yourself staring at dashboards and stats for long, trying to make sense of conflicting numbers, while your intuition says, “Something’s off here,” I'm sure you can relate to this. Yet this blog heroes neither data nor gut feeling — it’s all about embracing the middle ground where data meets gut feeling in decision-making.

Why does data feels like a safe bet?

According to a 2023 Pendo report, 70% of product teams say they rely “heavily” on analytics to guide product decisions. Data is your trusted source, providing real-world insights, charts, figures, and more. It’s objective, measurable, and keeps you believable. It’s what you lean on when you want to make a strong, defensible case for your decisions.

Sometimes, though, data can feel like a puzzle. It can be overwhelming, contradictory, or even misleading if you don’t look beyond the surface. Ironically, data validates the data vs gut feeling dilemma product managers often face. Consider this: 83% of product managers in a product company survey said they’ve had data, while Harvard Business Review warns that over-trusting data can misguide product decisions.

Gut feel is real

Your gut feel isn’t just a wild guess. It’s your empathy, your experience, your failures, your deep understanding of users, you're learning the hard way — all bundled into one intuitive voice.

How to keep both data and gut feel in play?

• Turn the gut feel into questions. Generate hypotheses, test, and then validate with data.

• Let numbers challenge your gut. If the data doesn’t match your instinct, dig further, investigate, and deep dive into research (sometimes ChatGPT can do that for you!) before you make a call.

• Get out of your inbox, teams, and slack and talk to users. There’s no shortcut to sharpening your intuition like hearing real stories.

• Be transparent with your team. Share how you’re balancing data and gut, so everyone understands your process. It builds trust and keeps everyone in the loop.

Who wins

You don’t have to pick a side. Sometimes data leads, sometimes your gut leads. And when they move together gracefully, magic happens.

Product management isn’t just about crunching numbers or following blindly. lt blends the art of empathy with the science of data. It’s frustrating, messy, exciting — and if you get it right, it is downright magical. So, the next time your spreadsheets and your gut are at odds, pause. Take a deep breath. Listen to both, but don’t let either lead alone. The magic happens in the middle — that’s where the best products are born.