In an ideal world, we PMs are encouraged and self-driven to make data driven decisions. But what about times when you don't have data to rely on? Sure, you can from then integrate analytics in your funnel but what about the time till the data has critical mass to be reliable? Worse, what if you are super new in the startup and there are decisions to be made everyday that affects the company as a whole?

Well, you can talk to people who have been in the system far longer than you've been. Talk to different teams. But if you're the first and only PM in the startup, surely the buck stops at you. What will you do? No silver bullet here amigo.

<aside> 💡 Trust the Gut. But keep a close eye and hope the decision has some reversibility quotient if things fall astray.

</aside>

Sharing an episode below concerning my early days at HealthAssure:

We had an old custom-built B2B dashboard for Deloitte's HR managers to track the health checkups of their employees. It had the functionality to add employees one by one and in a regimented CSV format. Had basic charting and visualization capabilities. No drill-down analytics or report scheduling features.

We had then somehow inexplicably built another dashboard that was highly customizable and carried the flexibility of adding and removing employees. Report upload/download feature. This was used for startups and tech-savvy organizations.

Now when I came for the B2B side we had this dichotomy of resources and work where we had to always think in terms of two different tools for different sorts of clients - Sales would dictate which tool to be given for whom. I found it quite bizarre and inefficient. I wanted to have one single dashboard being offered to every client with the best of functionalities - reliable, scalable, and customizable.

I had some push back from Sales on the grounds that the old one had been in use for 2 years and HRs were used to it and would only occasionally raise Change Requests. I connected with Engineering Head and made him realize that every quarter there would be some update required. Having understood the situation and background, I decided that we have to move old legacy large clients to this new dashboard. I asked Sales to connect with HRs and explain them plainly. we would demo them and help them migrate and solve their help queries.

I did not have much data backing me the success and if this could lead to some B2B relationship troubles. But we went ahead and did it.

It has been a fair decision so far.