Balancing heuristics and data

David Pier | Senior Product Manager @drdavidpier

13 Years ago

- Founded in 2003- Over 800 employees- 10 offices- 60m UMVs- 50m app downloads- 30 languages

We like data

Why get started with data?

- Make better decisions- Objective decision making- Measure what users do rather than what they say they do- Find problem areas in your product- Understand your traffic

HH

HIghest Paid Persons Opinion

HH

HH

We like experiments

Experiment data can uncover the importance of small changes

Product strategy = “Increase the KPI”

HH

HH

HH

HH

HH

HH

HH

HH

North star metric

HH

HH

HH

HH

HH

HH

Quantitative data is not a substitute for qualitative insight

Defaulting to hotels• 20% increase

travellers booking flights and a hotel

• Negligible impact on flights metrics

“Please stop defaulting me to Hotels I’m here for

flights!!”

“I do find it quite annoying because

when I look for Skyscanner what I

want to search for is flights, not hotels.”

All data has assumptions

Non-airport city search

- Obvious problem

- Complex build- Small use case- Problem not seen

in our data

“Rubbish instrumentation implies experienced guess is better than data led...”

“Should we always ignore what the data

says, or just this once?”

Photo by Evan Dennis

Thank you

@drdavidpier