Let’s Not Give Up Creativity Just Because We Can’t Measure It

Agility is a great, it pushes us to think fast, execute fast and iterate fast. Working in agile trained us to build “viable” products, products that maximize their value in a very short time. We learnt to blindly follow the MVP rules (Minimum Viable Product) and to build products based on statistics and user analytic. However, focusing on the “viability” of the products and developing products based on measurements only, could lead us to build pale products and not to how we visioned them.

Sometimes we have to trust more on our intuition if we want to achieve what we believe in. Not every product decision must come from an analytical decision. Developing just measurable features might produce a mediocre product. In optimization theory there is a popular method named Gradient Decent, where you move toward the solution that return the maximum value in a local environment. This is a great method, but it can “get stuck” in a local maximum. A better solution is using Stochastic Gradient Descent that add some randomness to each decision in order not to get stuck locally. Some products just get stuck in those local hills. Developing creative features that sometimes are hard to measure may lead to promising innovations and to far greater hills. Let’s not give up our creativity just because we can’t measure it.