The difference between conviction and guesswork

AI has not changed the importance of judgment in product leadership. What it has changed is the cost of getting it wrong.

Early in my career, I learned a principle that still guides how I think about building products: The strongest decisions rarely start with perfect data. They start with conviction, a hypothesis shaped by experience, customer insight, and pattern recognition. What ultimately separates high-performing product organizations from average ones is how quickly and confidently instinct is validated. That validation is the true role of product analytics, and increasingly, it is where AI amplifies its value.

Analytics tests whether what you believed would happen actually did, and to inform what you do next. When treating analytics as a decision engine rather than a reporting layer, it fundamentally changes how teams operate.

ANALYTICS SPRAWL REDUCES CLARITY

Across nearly every organization I have worked in, regardless of size or industry, one pattern shows up with remarkable consistency: analytics sprawl.

Google Analytics, Amplitude, Mixpanel, Adobe Analytics, and Pendo are all excellent tools, adopted with good intent to solve real problems. However, when all—or even several—coexist within a single organization, they often create fragmentation that undermines decision-making. The issue is not the tools themselves, but the absence of a clear leadership decision to standardize.

When analytics lives across multiple platforms, each with its own methodology and definitions, even basic questions become difficult to answer. AI magnifies that problem. Ask a simple question like, “How many monthly unique visitors do we get?” With data spread across multiple analytics platforms, there is no clean answer. You cannot aggregate the numbers. There is no deduplication. Slight differences in definitions erode trust. Teams stop discussing insights and start debating whose data is correct.

That is not a tooling failure. It is a decision-making failure.

INCONSISTENT DATA SCALES CONFUSION

This challenge matters even more in an AI-driven world because AI depends on coherence. Models train on ambiguous metrics. If foundations are inconsistent, AI will scale confusion faster than any human ever could.

Especially in organizations with multiple business units and products, analytics must start before dashboards, instrumentation plans, or AI ambitions. It starts with clarity. This comes from understanding what decisions must be made with confidence and what questions must be answered consistently across teams.

Once that is established, everything else follows. Selecting the right product analytics platform is based on business requirements, not convenience. That platform may differ by context. In fact, I have yet to implement the same analytics tool twice. What stays the same is the discipline required to make analytics and AI effective at scale. Instinct may start the journey, but data must validate it. Tool sprawl is a leadership choice rather than a technical inevitability, and shared definitions matter far more than dashboards or models.

Analytics and AI only matter when they improve decisions. When that foundation exists, AI becomes a true force multiplier, and organizations gain speed, trust, and the ability to scale. Insights surface faster, patterns emerge sooner, and teams spend far less time reconciling data and far more time acting on it. Leaders move from reacting to signals to shaping outcomes. Without that foundation, AI simply makes bad analytics louder.

A SIMPLE CHALLENGE FOR LEADERS

If you lead product, technology, or digital teams, here are three simple questions to consider:

• How many analytics tools does your organization use across your products?
• Do your teams share the same definitions for basic metrics?
• Can you answer a question once and trust the answer everywhere?

If those answers vary, the issue is not analytics or AI. It is decision-making. If your AI strategy is ahead of your analytics foundations, you are scaling uncertainty, not intelligence.

Darren Person is EVP and chief digital officer of Cengage Group.