The product management profession has fully embraced data-driven decision-making. Every conference talk, every job description, every stakeholder conversation reinforces the same message: show me the data. Decisions backed by metrics are rational. Decisions based on judgment are risky. The result is a generation of product managers who feel they cannot make a move without a dashboard to justify it.
At Gathering #11 in Ghent, Quinten Vandermeulen, Co-founder and CPO of Mbrella, offered a counterpoint. Not against data, but against the blind faith in data that has become the default in many product organizations. His talk explored what product intuition actually is, how it develops, and why the best product decisions often come from a combination of data and judgment rather than data alone.
Original Presentation Slides
Download the slides from this talk as presented at the gathering.
The Data-Driven Illusion
Quinten opened by challenging a widely held assumption: that data-driven decisions are inherently better than judgment-based ones. His argument was not that data is useless but that the way most product teams use data creates a false sense of certainty.