Letting data inform your product starts with an educated guess, or hypothesis, keeping in mind that simpler hypotheses often make for better products. This is how KISSinsights (now Qualaroo) began.

(source: Optimizely)

When we were conducting customer development interviews for KISSmetrics, our analytics product, we heard product people and marketers saying one thing over and over: "It's too hard to figure out what people are thinking when they visit my website."

This problem had nothing to do with KISSmetrics and the questions we were asking, but it popped up frequently enough to be interesting. Cindy Alvarez, our team lead for research, says, "one person might be a nutcase. Ten people are not all nutcases."

Our hypothesis for KISSinsights was informed by this qualitative data. Product managers have a problem doing fast, effective, and frequent customer research. There were two parts to this that we had to figure out:

1. Is this a recognizable, interesting pain? 2. Where exactly is the pain?

The survey tools available to product people at the time forced users into a separate page, and interrupted whatever they were doing on your site. This meant that they rarely filled out surveys, and it was incredibly painful to get user feedback.

We had our hypothesis for the product. If you can send a user a highly specific question that's relevant to what they're doing on your website, then they'll actually answer it because that it poses minimal interruption to the user workflow.

The resulting product sent a pop-up survey to users who had been on a specific webpage of a site for a specific period of time, and took 5 minutes tops to set up. Instead of the 1% to 2% response rate typical to existing survey tools, KISSinsights netted customers anywhere from a 10% to 40% response rate.

20 customer development interviews provided us with enough qualitative data to build and launch an MVP of KISSinsights. We didn't have enough data to know it would be successful, only enough to inform a hunch-but it was all we needed. Acting on limited data trumps getting more data.

Within a year, KISSinsights was acquired by Sean Ellis. Today, it's called Qualaroo.