I think that is also a weakness at Google. They are great at tracking and processing data, but I don't think they are good at intersecting what that data means with the human priorities behind the data. In other words, they can tell if A > B for existing work, but they don't seem to do very good at telling whether C will be better than A, instead choosing to shotgun and hope enough stuff sticks.

Good product management (which early founders must do) is about determining what data to gather by figuring out why the data is important to the future of the product. It costs money/time to gather and analyze data, so knowing you are gathering the right data is important. In the process, you hope to be able to answer whether C will be greater than A.