Kurgan: Product teams in data-rich environments must trust data over intuition
Stephane Kurgan · Stephane Kurgan: Lessons Scaling King from 100 Employees to 2,400; How to Find Great Talent | E1041 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings · Jul 28, 2023 · at 3:06
Stephane Kurgan, former COO of King (creator of Candy Crush), shares operational lessons from scaling the gaming company.
“Trust the data, not your intuition. You know, King was always pretty data driven, but it, it's, it was an incredibly data rich environment. I mean, the beauty of free to play on Facebook and later on mobile is that it provides you know, faster and a higher quantity of data than almost any other business. And very often we had product intuition in terms of features or whatever, where, you know, the team would think, okay, this is what we need to change or And the data would give you a completely different answer. And I think it's very, I mean, it's been a great lesson in humility for product people. You have to be ready to be wrong. You have to, you know, read carefully the data and act upon it.”
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