Beyond the Hype: Why "Data Driven Products Now!" Is the Wake-Up Call Tech Teams Need
In an industry that worships at the altar of intuition and visionary founders, Dan McKinley's "Data Driven Products Now!" presentation arrives like a cold splash of reality. It's not just another paean to big data or machine learning, rather it's a humble, hard-won manifesto about how to actually build products that matter. And in doing so, it exposes the uncomfortable truth about most product development: we've been flying blind.
McKinley's narrative begins at Etsy in 2007, a time when the company's mantra was "we should be data driven" without anyone really knowing what that meant. Sound familiar? How many companies today sprinkle some numbers on a slide deck, wave the "data driven" flag, and proceed exactly as before? McKinley calls this what it is: "display behavior." The real revelation comes when Etsy started A/B testing in earnest and discovered what so many teams refuse to admit: most of their brilliant ideas were either useless or actively harmful.
The most powerful insight in McKinley's presentation is his evolution of the product development process. The old way—idea → code → ship → hope—gave way to something more rigorous: validate with data first, build minimally, test, and only then polish. This isn't just about avoiding failure; it's about creating multiple off-ramps for bad ideas before they consume precious resources. As McKinley demonstrates with his furniture landing page example, you can often estimate a project's potential impact with existing data before writing a single line of code.
What makes this presentation so compelling is its resistance to dogma. McKinley isn't advocating for data worship; he's advocating for data humility. He acknowledges that sometimes you'll still need to make educated guesses, but even those should be informed by what you already know. The formula he walks through: visitors × conversion rate × average order value × improvement potential, isn't exactly revolutionary, but its consistent application would transform most product teams.
The most uncomfortable truth McKinley delivers is that success often lies to us. When Etsy was growing geometrically, the team mistakenly believed their product decisions were driving that growth. It's a cognitive bias that plagues our industry: we confuse correlation with causation, then build entire product philosophies on that confusion. Only when the growth slowed did they realize how many features they'd built that nobody actually used.
If there's a weakness in McKinley's approach, it's that it requires a cultural shift that many organizations will resist. It means admitting that your product instincts are often wrong, that your brilliant idea might be the next Alchemy (Etsy's feature that sold as much in three years as the rest of the site sold in a day). It means prioritizing learning over shipping, which runs counter to the "move fast and break things" ethos that still dominates tech culture.
But maybe that's the point. In a world of unlimited ideas and limited resources, the most innovative thing you can do is stop guessing and start measuring. McKinley's presentation isn't just about being data driven. It's about being reality driven. And for teams willing to embrace that humility, it might just be the most important product advice they'll ever receive.
Sources:
- Dan McKinley, "Data Driven Products Now!" presentation, https://datadriven.club/
Crepi il lupo! 🐺