No intuitions

I spotted what follows in a job offer:

Analytical observation to built your decision with data and no intuitions.

How many times is this wrong? For starters, “to build” your decision, not “to built”. And you “build” decisions? In… French? Or German, perhaps? Whatever. More importantly: never use your intuition! How were the original choices made, if not by intuition? Choices about the user interface, the first advertising campaigns etc?

Don’t ever do it again. Look at the data, and that’s all you need to know. Why not feed the data into a machine, then? This is not how it works. How it works is: you look at data, and you spot something you don’t like. Conversions from the homepage to sign-ups, for example, are low. Then you look at your homepage, and make a guess.

You use your intuition to say something like: if only we had a bigger sign-up button! Or a better explanation of why you should sign up and give us a try. And it’s exactly your intuition that tells you what could be wrong with your homepage. Data just gives you information about the past, not ideas about how to make the future better.

Then you say something like: if the bigger (and greener!) sign up button helps us get 10% more sign-ups, then we’ll be happy and consider the experiment a success. Then and only then can you rely on numbers only: was your intuition right, or not?