for W3c validation

Note: as I’m currently evaluating and interviewing for product manager opportunities, I’m publishing many answers to the product, behavioral, business, and life questions I’m researching/practicing publicly rather than keep them private in a Google doc.

Tell me when you made a judgment call since you didn’t have any data.

A few examples…

1. When considering the “mobile, social email newsletter reader” concept (one of many potential pivots for Oh Hey World) — I didn’t have enough hard data to make a decision about putting money toward building the product. I interviewed numerous additional publishers, as well as readers. What I heard was (most) readers didn’t have a real problem in need of a solution — even though publishers would love to have more data about what their audience was consuming (email is a black hole of analytics). The result was deciding to not move forward with building the product. You can read more about that concept here if you’d like.
2. While consulting for StreetAdvisor, we didn’t have any data indicating how much, or if, corporations would pay for an enterprise (white label) version of the product. Nor did we know exactly what primary pain point the product solved. I conducted research with human resource directors, and ended up positioning it more as an employee happiness offering than solving a specific relocation information problem. You can see how we ended up positioning the enterprise offering here: http://enterprise.streetadvisor.com/
3. Monthly pricing for Geek Estate’s new private community of real estate technology creatives was a judgement call. I settled on $97 every 3 months as regular pricing, and decided to let the first 25 members in at $20 per month (for life) and the second 25 members in at $25 per month (for life). Those 50 members will be founding members. Since I didn’t know what people would pay, I researched other paid niche communities and spoke with several target members of the community to bounce pricing ideas off of. I ended up modeling the pricing after DynamiteCircle, a digital nomad community I’ve belonged to for the past several years.