Evidence beats opinion, but most companies run on opinion

We come up with an idea, we believe in it, all the indications show it's good. Maybe the early tests show it's good, then we just go all in and we try to implement it and I made this very mistake many times as the product manager, I was the guy pushing for the ideas.

Everything in our backlog is a bet, everything. Whether we do discovery or not, everything is a bet. Discovery is helping us make a better bet.

If you tell that to yourself and you tell it to your team, all of a sudden, it goes from being an intuition to being a fact. Well, you better hope you're right because if you orient your strategy around fixing a problem and you're wrong, your company's going to fail.

The decision is about have you exhausted the possibilities? Creating the distance so that you can make an intellectual rational decision about it rather than an emotional decision is essential. And the reason I say you have to be coldly rational about it is because it's fucking humiliating.

I don't know if they need this specific method. They're very... One thing I discovered by the way, there's two types of companies that really benefit from this technique. One is those companies that are kind of emerging into modern product development... and the other type is those companies that used to be evidence guided and they regressed.

I'm saying I don't have to know the answer to the thing. If on a systemic basis I let these ideas and then you respond to the ones that are working that are viable, it doesn't really matter if you didn't know ahead of time which ones were going to work.