Karthick Gopal

Here’s something I have started to notice in well-meaning but very large companies. When you operate at a large scale. Innovation is slow. Not because you don’t have talented people or a bold vision, but because the risk of getting it wrong is costly. Sometimes fatal.

So most companies rely on Data and Customer Feedback as their guiding paradigms. But, the over reliance on data or customer feedback, in my opinion, dims the ability to tune into intuition and inevitably becomes a crutch.

Sometimes you might have an idea that’s just too early and not the right time. Like Google Glass. Arguably everything Meta does today with their Rayban collab was in Google Glass’ roadmap. But the tech wasn’t there. The hardware wasn’t there, the fidelity wasn’t, AI wasn’t and most likely a coherent strategy was absent. Could Google fundamentally have pushed that into existence despite being too early? Why didn’t Google successfully launch Google Circle+. Their social network much touted out to be a competitor to Facebook but flopped pretty badly.

In both cases, Google lost and Facebook won because of one important decision weighing mechanism. Data.

It is what both companies have pushed so hard on before Amazon came along that now most software companies live and die by the sword of data. Google’s after all famous for testing 41 shades of blue to determine which one was the right one to use.

It is a very hard task to know what to build and then build it without risk. But I find relying on customer data to source a problem on what isn’t working the way you intended it to be. Or what is the problem with the existing offering you have.

So is the right thing look at customer data? If the customer didn’t ask for it how would we know they wanted it? The story about Henry Ford runs in my head a lot. He said famously, “If I asked people what they wanted they would have said we want a faster horse.” Steve Jobs famously said, “People don’t know what they want until we show them”.

When a company doesn’t have a stance on Design or Experience, it turns to data to solve problems. “At google we reduce each decision to a simple logic problem. Remove all subjectivity and just look at the data. Data in your favor? Ok, launch it. Data shows negative effects? Back to the drawing board. And that data eventually becomes a crutch for every decision, paralyzing the company and preventing it from making any daring design decisions.” – Doug Bowman

This eventually paralyzes the company and boldness, in most cases, dies.

But how do you take bold decisions when you don’t have data? When Data isn’t available, boldness is not recklessness. It is conviction informed by insight.

I believe you can , through First Principles. Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos had it right in two parts. Reason from First Principles keeping the customer needs in mind.

Data in itself is a reflection of the past. When you’re building the future, you have to reason from first principles. The fundamental truths about human behavior, technology, and context should guide you.

We have to ask, what do we know for sure about how people feel, choose, and behave? I think we should recognize that discomfort is often a signal of originality, not danger. In such moments, we shouldn’t ask “Where’s the proof?” but “What would have to be true for this to work?”

Before metrics, there are first stories. Watching what delights, confuses, or frustrates even a handful of users is enough to try new things. These qualitative signals like emotion, resonance, adoption, delight are early data. I think we should learn to quantify the unquantifiable over time.

When data can’t guide you, curiosity must. Bold decisions come not from ignoring evidence, but from being willing to create it. The paradox of innovation is that the best ideas start where the data stops.