Balancing product judgment against experiment and usage data when they disagree

In a product manager interview at TradeLedger, you are asked how you trade off intuition against empirical data. Explain how you decide how much weight each one gets when you make product decisions, and support your approach with a real decision where your instinct and the data pointed in different directions, or where there was little data to go on. ```hint Show when each should win The interviewer wants to see that you can tell when evidence is strong enough to overrule a hunch, and when a hunch is worth acting on or testing because the data cannot answer the question yet. Anchor this in one specific decision. ``` ### Clarifying Questions - Would you like my general approach, a specific example, or both? - Should the example be one where the data contradicted my instinct, or one where there was too little data to rely on, such as a new product or market? - Is an example where I followed my instinct and turned out to be wrong acceptable? ### What a Strong Answer Covers - A repeatable way to decide how much weight data and intuition get, based on the quality of the evidence, how reversible the decision is and what a wrong call would cost. - An understanding of what data can and cannot show, and of where intuition comes from and how it can be biased. - A specific decision with real tension between instinct and data: how it was resolved, the measurable outcome and the lesson. - How stakeholders were brought along when the call went against the dashboard or against a senior person's instinct. - Honesty about a time the approach failed and what changed afterward. ### Follow-up Questions - Tell me about a time you overrode the data and were wrong. What did you change in how you decide? - How do you handle a senior stakeholder whose strong instinct contradicts clear experiment results? - What do you do when a decision is due before there is time to gather any data?