Why Data Alone Doesn’t Build Great Products

I've read Alchemy by Rory Sutherland and Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman at very different points in my career—but strangely, they’ve both shaped how I approach product thinking today.

One is about intuition, irrationality, and the surprising power of creative eccentricity.
The other is a deep dive into how our minds process information—when we trust our gut, and when we should question it.

Together, these two books helped me understand something that’s become one of my personal product philosophies:
Great products are rarely built on logic alone.

I’ve worked with people who are completely data-driven.
Every idea needs a supporting metric.
Every decision must be backed by a framework.
Every proposal is challenged with “Where’s the proof?”

On paper, it sounds like a good way to build.
But in reality, it’s exhausting.

We end up debating decimal points and confidence intervals when the problem isn’t precision—it’s people.
And people are emotional, unpredictable, and often irrational.
As Rory puts it:

“Logical ideas often fail because logic demands universally applicable laws, but humans, unlike atoms, are not consistent enough in their behaviour for such laws to hold very broadly.”

You can feel this tension in product meetings—
You’ve got customer feedback.
You’ve got research reports.
You’ve got the prioritization framework with weights and multipliers.
And still, deep inside, you know something’s off.

Or the opposite—an idea that looks “illogical” on paper just feels right.

But the data-driven folks can’t accept that.
If it’s not in the spreadsheet, it doesn’t exist.

This is where Kahneman's perspective comes in:

“Intuition is nothing more and nothing less than recognition.”

When I trust my gut in product calls, it’s not magic.
It’s accumulated experience.
It’s thousands of micro-patterns my brain has quietly stored.
It’s not irrational—just not easily explainable.

And that’s what makes building products so hard in overly logical environments.
We forget that not everything valuable can be measured.
Not everything meaningful can be A/B tested.
Some of the best decisions I’ve made as a product manager started with “I just have a feeling this will work.”

So here’s what I believe:

Product management is a balancing act between Thinking Fast and Thinking Slow—between logic and instinct, frameworks and feelings.
And sometimes, a little bit of Alchemy is what brings the magic to the table.

Connecting the dots between these two books has become part of how I build and lead.
It’s not about ignoring data—it’s about knowing when to go beyond it.

Because if we only build what the data tells us to build,
we’ll never build what no one knew they needed.