alt Hacker NewsData and metrics is 90% what upper management sees of your project. You might not care about it, and treat it as an afterthought, but it's almost the most important thing about it organizationally.
People who don't heed this advice get to discover it for themselves (I sure did)
IF you can't make the data convincing, you'll lose all trust, and nobody will do business with you.
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It is not just embarrassing, it can potentially kill your demo, project or even product as user will first look at data and then the tech behind it. If the data is wrong, it means the tech does not work. I never took data seriously during my demos in the first 10 years of my career and no wonder the audience rejected most of my work though it was backed by solid platforms.
I have learned that you must have data.
I have also learned that rarely does anyone care if it’s any good, or means anything. This is generally true, but it’s especially true if you are going with the prevailing winds of whatever management fads are going on.
Like, right now, you can definitely get away with inflating the efficacy of “AI” any way you can, in almost any company. Nobody with any authority will call you on it.
Look at what management’s talking about and any pro-that numbers you come up with can be total gibberish, nobody minds. “Oh man, collecting good numbers for this and getting a baseline etc etc is practically impossible” ok so don’t and just use bad numbers that align with what management wants to do anyway. You’ll do great.