Intuition-driven vs. data-driven products - Ravi Swaminathan & Seth Barron, TaskHuman

Product Innovation Series with Aram Melkoumov

What do you get when you rely on your intuition instead of just what customers tell you? The iPod. Today we discuss the creative leaps of faith you should and shouldn’t take when developing your product.

About Ravi Swaminathan
Ravi Swaminathan is the CEO of TaskHuman. He believes in egoless leadership. Egoless leadership is about being at peace with not having all the answers today and believing that more answers will come with time. Previously, was President at WiZER and a VP at SanDisk amongst other roles.

About Seth Barron
Seth Barron is the Head of Product Management at TaskHuman. He thinks new features should only be added if they remove friction from the user experience. His litmus test is asking: will things be simpler for the user after adding this feature? Previously, Seth spent 16 years at Google. He is also a Yogi.

SHOW NOTES:
00:00 | Who are Ravi Swaminathan and Seth Barron?
01:12 | Google, but for people
04:04 | Obsessing about consumer experience
07:53 | Egoless product development
11:22 | More than a paycheck
14:46 | Asking your customers vs. following your gut
17:59 | Taking data-driven leaps of faith
21:55 | Is the feature good enough yet? (litmus test)
25:49 | Myth of objectivity

Quotes:
(17:42) “I'd rather follow what people are doing rather than what people are saying.” - Ravi
(19:39) “I think a lot of product leaders get lost is they get lost in the data and they don't effectively synthesize the insight. The data is just the observation, The insight is the understanding. So something that I think about all the time is: how do I synthesize the signal from the noise?”

Follow Ravi Swaminathan
https://www.linkedin.com/in/raviswaminathan/

Follow Seth Barron
https://www.linkedin.com/in/seth-barron-nyc/