Gut Feel vs Ground Truth
Product teams know the drill: requests flood in from sales, support, and customers themselves.
Prioritization meetings regularly devolve into passionate debates over which new feature is “urgent” or “game-changing.” More often than not, the loudest voice in the room, or the most memorable customer anecdote, wins. But are these gut feel decisions actually moving the needle for your business? Or are they quietly skewing your roadmap and slowing your growth?
It’s time to challenge the status quo of product prioritization. If your team is still relying on gut feel or a handful of sticky anecdotes to guide what you build, you’re putting your roadmap (and your results) at risk.
Why gut feel is overrated
It’s easy to see why teams fall back on gut instinct. When major accounts demand a feature, it feels risky to say no. When your sales or customer success leads passionately advocate for an enhancement based on a recent call, it’s normal to want to react quickly.
But this approach has serious downsides:
- It rewards the most vocal customers, not the needs of your actual user base
- Slow, manual data collection means feedback is trapped in siloed notes, disparate systems, or simply lost
- Teams are constantly firefighting the latest complaint, rather than building meaningful, strategic capabilities
- What’s worse, teams can be misled by apparent consensus or urgency from a minority of users, while missing broader needs hiding in plain sight.
The result? Roadmaps packed with “one-off” features, constant context switching, and a product that doesn’t scale or sell.
The cost of anecdotes over evidence
Reliance on anecdotes leads to skewed priorities. One customer’s demands might outweigh feedback from dozens of quieter but more profitable clients. Sales teams may push for features that close immediate deals, not those that drive long-term value. Product managers lose precious time rooting through Slack, email threads, and CRM logs to pick up real insights
Worse, decision-making becomes about personalities, not users. Engineers push back, commercial teams feel unheard, and the “voice of the customer” gets reduced to a few second-hand stories
A New Approach: Customer-led roadmaps
It doesn’t have to be this way. Today’s leading product teams are embracing technology to surface ground truth over gut feel.
AI-powered platforms like Four/Four aggregate, transcribe, and analyse customer conversations at scale. Trends, sentiment, and pain points emerge not from anecdotes but from real patterns in actual customer feedback across all channels
Instead of guessing, product managers can quickly see:
- Which issues and feature requests come up most frequently and which matter most to users
- Where your product fails to meet key user needs, based on actual language and context
- How feedback is shifting quarter to quarter, so you adapt before it’s too late
- Which ideas drive revenue growth, customer retention, and real business outcomes
These insights make it possible to validate, or challenge, your assumptions with data, not debate. No more building just for the loudest customer. No more “gut feel” projects that stall. Instead, you ship what matters to the market and your business.
It’s time to ditch the anecdotes
The future of product is customer-led, not opinion-led. The technology exists to make evidence-driven decisions easy and actionable. If you’re still relying on gut feel, you’re fighting the last war.
Stop letting anecdotes set your priorities. Start building what all your customers actually need.
Is your roadmap guided by ground truth, or just what you heard last week? The difference matters.