How do you wrestle with the importance of being data-driven/tracking progress for community health <> not potentially run the mistake of optimizing for the wrong thing in community ?

Seen this dynamic a few times, curious if anyone has any opinions.

cofounder @DeepALTR (acq. by Commsor).   building better cultures>>better communities>>better outcomes  https://twitter.com/ngaurav38  community x crypto x saas

I never really liked the word "data-driven". I rather always say "data-informed" because at the end of the day, data suggestes something, but I always talked to users to dig deeper and find out what they think and if it's really worth the time to optimize it.

Product Manager & web3 explorer! @purple #56. twitter.com/dbdogan

Ever feel like you're in a situation where the 1on1 sentiment says one thing,but the overall trends says another? 

For ex., w product where a user says they like "x", but analytics data says the opposite. 

Curious w how to deal w something similar but in managing community.

I love this story, thanks for sharing. 

Very pertinent how the data in it of itself would have created some preconceived conclusions if you hadn't verified that sentiment directly w the community. 

great example of finding ways to balance quantitative <> qualitative perspective

Long story short: be completely transparent with your community. Tell them what you have found out and your potential plans. They will say if they agree/disagree.

btw, I was responsible for internal products. So the users were my colleagues.

I always told them to contact me, if they would like to talk about it. But I also made sure to talk to them to understand if we are on the right track. For me, it worked out.

At my previous company, every 3 weeks, I always presented what my team is currently building or the status of certain features. I also showed them data, if available, to explain them why I prioritised this over that or made certain decisions.

These smaller improvements increased the number of users slowly.

I was fully transparent with them and told about my plans to potentially sunset this product and they were not happy. At the end, I left the product in the roadmap and I tried to plan some time in each delivery cycle to make smaller improvements over time.

Data also showed that the product was not used so often. So I talked to users and asked them what they think about this product. They all said that they love the vision of the product and it would be a game changer for them, but at the current state it is not very usable.

So my experience comes from web2, but it could be applicable to web3 communities,too.
I had a slightly different situation, where I wanted to sunset a product who was stuck in the MVP stage for too long because of other business priorities, but maintaining it was quite annoying.