Customer intelligence for product teams and our collective data delusion

Hi, tired product person here, slowly realizing our customer intelligence setup is basically vibes with a spreadsheet.

We have all the things, social listening, nps, crazy dashboards on competitors, feature usage, crm notes, support tags, the whole b2b saas bingo card. Yet every roadmap meeting somehow turns into whoever talks the loudest about that one angry customer call from three months ago.

The marketing team sends us these beautiful decks about sentiment and competitive moves and market trends. Then we walk into planning and it is “my gut says customers want dark mode in the admin for reasons” and boom that wins. Meanwhile there is an entire wall of data quietly screaming that churn is tied to onboarding confusion and one broken flow in the first week.

Customer intelligence tools keep telling me we have patterns, micro segments, intent signals, all this fancy stuff. But in practice our process is “someone screenshots a rant on twitter, someone else pastes a line from a user interview into slack, pm writes a one pager, leadership nods, feature exists forever”. Idk if this is normal or if we are just allergic to actual evidence.

Would love any tips on how you got product teams to stop roleplaying data driven and start using customer intelligence like grown ups instead of horoscope for backlog items :/