At Google, opinions don't count in meetings. Every proposal needs data to back it up. A/B testing lets teams settle debates fast instead of letting the loudest voice win.
One really important part about Google was that we would not have opinions in meetings. You couldn't go into a meeting and say, I think. I think we should do this. I think we should do that. It was all about data. And data, really, we found in every place. It's easy to say now, oh, just look at the data and everything will be told. And today you have A/B testing and multivariate testing and all that, and you can actually look at a lot of data. But it doesn't take a lot of data points to actually get to an answer. But if you have no data whatsoever, you just have opinions. And if you just have opinions, you usually get in arguments with people over your opinion, and then the loudest voice wins. At Google, we would always look at data. And I think every decision that a company should be making should be made on data, at least attempt to make it with data.
