The really interesting takeaway from this article for me was that product executives make many decisions based on simple intuition, industry experience, and "I've heard it worked over there."

There are numerous mentions of failed product roll-outs(News Feed as a failure at first, Paper, etc.) But the key quote is here, when they talk about the meeting: "Cox agrees. 'My intuition, which we could prove wrong, is people just want more stuff.'

I'm sure that Facebook uses data to back up some of its assertions; after all, they did mine comments to come up with the most common reactions. But how many people's entire internet experience (i.e. consumption of news through the News Feed) is impacted just by some senior guy in a room going, "This sounds right to me," and everyone scrambling to work on what he proposes?