@ Cindy – I’m hearing a lot of that same sort of talk… and it’s actually starting to make me a little worried. Testing those hunches is a great idea–even just modeling it out could help validate (or not) the gut instinct. I know everyone is feeling pressured by the economy to not make mistakes and try to repeat success. And I’m not going to argue against repeating success! But, at the same time, if we cut back on innovation and experimentation, what are you left with when the economy rebounds?

But I’d say: those things are the building blocks of commoditization. Follow those processes and you have a good chance of assembling an okay product – but you need some leaps of faith to build a great one.

There’s NOTHING wrong with gut instinct, unless you treat it as a divine inspiration and don’t question it. Got an instinct/hunch about something? Treat it as a hypothesis. Design an experiment to validate or disprove it.

Identify the risk (i.e. wasting 4 months dev time, losing a big deal, spending $) and figure out how to minimize that risk while testing your hypothesis. And guess what? The way you do that testing and risk minimizing is going to vary. Sometimes your methods won’t be pretty. But some of the greatest innovations came from ugly upbringings.