intuitively i agree with you, i've seen a lot of the pseudo-science.
But curious, can you elaborate on how telemetry driven development leads to organizational turf wars? I think i've seen that too but interested to hear your thoughts.
Everything from what gets tracked to how the data gets interpreted. It also can put a target on certain growth areas that will attract the more "ambitious" people from the company. All will try to make the case with the telemetry data.
Does more time on a page mean users are more engaged or are they struggling to find out what's going on? Depends on which product manager can make a better case, probably involving even more telemetry which has to get prioritized.
In the creative IC model, the designer and developer work to solve a problem based on their experience building product. Or someone has a kick ass idea one day and just implements it creating a step change in usage. That type of environment requires freedom and trust, it also puts a lot of control in the hands of the ICs which is why it's not popular with product managers, directors, vps...
I agree with you in spirit but you have to realize that every developer and designer pairs will think they are the ones that know what they are doing and should have the trust. I've seen trust be given for periods of years and teams simply wasting time and not meaningfully improving anything. This only works with good product people on board and most product people aren't any good at product.
Saying that you’ll use data to make decisions doesn’t change that - most people can’t tell the difference between meaningful data and random sets of numbers with a headline, so it’s still trust awarded to the most convincing salesman.
> In the creative IC model, the designer and developer work to solve a problem based on their experience building product.
This is great for helping to build products, not companies. Companies are larger than just their products; they also have obligations to existing customers, stakeholders represented by auditors, etc. That's not an argument that new products should be anchored down by these other concerns; it's an argument that "creative IC" should only be launched with clear alpha/beta/preview-style labeling, and that there should also be engineers who are not paired with Product, whose job it is to "fill in the rest", so to speak, because it's also important.
But curious, can you elaborate on how telemetry driven development leads to organizational turf wars? I think i've seen that too but interested to hear your thoughts.