Hey Product Manager: The Problem With “Trusting Your Gut”

Sometimes your gut instinct is wrong. I discovered this a number of years ago after launching a new product. A strange phenomenon was happening. The more support interactions a customer had, the more likely they were to keep using the product. Wait — what? The more problems customers had, the longer they stayed with us?

This felt counter-intuitive at the time. My gut told me that an increase in support requests was a sign that the product was not working as expected. Today I understand that...