One of the people in the audience asked why we couldn’t tell him with any level of certainty if he spent X how much Y would he get. He used the example of a pen. I think this shows the disconnect. Using production or manufacturing analogies is approaching the problem from a point of view I don’t agree with.

Creating great user experiences is not a production process. While there are some things that are repeatable and somewhat predictable much of it isn’t.

Like anything there are always exceptions and some online activities have clear cause and effect relationships that can be measured and optimized. Typically these are activities where variables can be isolated and controlled (AdWords, display ads etc.).