Sure, you can spend the weeks to months of expensive and time consuming work it takes to get a fuzzy, half accurate and biased picture of what your users workflows look like through user interviews and surveys. Or you can look at the analytics, which tell you everything you need to know immediately, always up to date, with perfect precision.

Sometimes HN drives me crazy. From this thread you’d think telemetry is screen recording your every move and facial expression and sending it to the government. I’ve worked at places that had telemetry and it’s more along the granularity of “how many people clicked the secondary button on the third tab?” This is a far cry from “spying on users”.

Exactly - purely "data driven" decisions are how we end up with ads really close to (or overlapping with) some button you want to press, because the data says that increase click-through rate! But it's actually a user-hostile feature that everyone hates.

We do both and they yield different learnings. They are complementary. We also have an issue tracking board with upvotes. I would say to your point that you can't improve what you don't measure.

What people say, and what people do are different things. Especially when the people who agree to talk to you aren't representative of the whole user base.

It's sort of hilarious to compare "talking to people" with analytics. I'm not defending Github here, but you can't possibly think that "talking to 1M customers" is viable.

> Don't take what people say at face value, but think about it together with your knowledge and experience

While you’re comparing different information sources, you might even want to consider telemetry, too.