A big part of product management's function is buffering all the features being asked for so that they can take a step back and design a solution that isn't just 100 new features. The feature factory process is mostly a symptom of product being bad at their job.
Sure, but my point was that this article seems to be focused on data-driven product decision-making. Creating good designs with far reach in my view is unrelated. I wanted to counter the narrative that unless you are spying on your users and using that to 'prove' your features are being successful you are doing a bad job at product development.
It's certainly possible in my mind to do requirements gathering, feature design, implementation, deployment, and iteration without automated data collection from user behavior. You can, you know, talk to people. Nowadays when someone says "data-driven" they typically mean "instrument the hell out of your product and observe user behavior." Perhaps that's not what the author is getting at. But if they are, I think it's important to tell people to not feel guilty for not spying on their users. If you are doing the follow-up work to actually communicate with customers to understand their needs, you should feel confident that you're doing your job well. And you should be proud that you are doing so without having to spy on people.
