I can't express how much I dislike the advice to be "data-driven" and collect all the data you possibly can because it could be useful someday. While this may or may not be sound business advice, it's deeply unsettling to see such profound disregard for user privacy trumpeted as a key to scaling quickly.
toxic datadriven cultures will say "You must have data to do X" while the status quo never had to face that bar. It becomes impossible to prove something because you're never given the resources to even gather the data, let alone try an experiment to move it. So then it becomes "unless its obviously broken, we don't want to know the truth" .
I strongly disagree that being data-driven and collecting a lot of data is directly correlated with disregarding user privacy. You can collect a lot of data on how customers interact with your product without associating any of this data with a specific customer.
And also the goal of being data-driven is not to scale fast. The goal is to validate your features are meeting the assumptions and expectations while providing customers with as much value as possible.
Optus and Medicare in Australia have recently had major breaches and the fallout in public opinion is still going on.
A panel on the news was interesting; one person likened data to uranium - dangerous to hold and difficult to dispose of. The other likened it to the new gold.
It'll be nice when legislation tightens up to minimize the latter feeling.
Huh, I fairly recently started working in healthcare records and I actually told people that they way they talk about PHI (personal health information), you'd think the hard drives were radioactive. In fact we had to come up with and follow some very detailed procedures to dispose of it.
