Katie Bauer!

There's a lot of pressure in the modern workplace to be data driven, but you don't have to try too hard to find a salty data scientist who can tell you a story (or two or three) about a time that "product intuition" or "strategic bets" were used to justify a decision instead.

While this is frustrating, insisting that every decision be purely quantitative also misses the point. It's almost as if people think performing the Sacred Ritual of A/B Testing protects them from being wrong, when the real goal of using data is being better than yesterday

IMO, rather than attempting to predict the future, the most practical, scalable and immediately valuable use of data is to understand how the present compares to the past. This is the real reason why being data driven is worthwhile--it's a form of accountability.

If you've ever budgeted to save money, or tracked your daily footsteps to become more active, congratulations! You've taken something it's easy to make excuses about and forced some objectivity into it. You're keeping yourself honest, which is what being data driven is all about.