Psychological Biases which Product Managers should avoid

Published in

Agile Insider

2 min readJun 5, 2023

Human beings often act as creatures of emotion than reason. This has consequences for both our personal and professional lives.

Becoming aware of these biases and actively working to minimize their effects can help improve our decision-making skills.

In the context of product management, there are three biases that lead us on the path of flawed decision making

1. CONFIRMATION BIAS

It is the tendency to look for information that confirms your point of view.
Manifestation in product: Cherry-picking customer feedback to defend features you want to build, asking leading questions in customer research, using a certain metric to prove an initiative’s success.

It means giving too much importance to the most recent events.
Manifestation in product: An old software bug suddenly needs to be fixed because “you” discovered it, prioritising user problems that came up in yesterday’s feedback call.

It is a bias in the selection process where you focus on a group that succesfully passed a selection criterion while overlooking the group that did not pass.
Manifestation in product: Concentrating your research and testing on the most active users of the product. This leads to having a one-sided view of your product and how it fits into your customer’s lives. (Their experiences with your product might be very different from the non-active users)

Being aware of your biases is the first step towards tackling them.

Following are some helpful best practices to overcome your biases:

Engage with team members who challenge your viewpoints — People do not see the things the way you do, help you significantly improve your decision-making process.
Promote a culture of asking questions in meetings — The more questions people ask, the more clarity you get.
Have a proper roadmap planning process in place — Prioritize features and user problems through a collaborative process involving multiple stakeholders. Don’t take decisions on the fly.
Have a solid basis for making a decision to prioritize a certain feature or bug — Is there usage data that backs up your position? Do you have anecdotal evidence from multiple customers who reported the same problem?
If you are not convinced with a certain decision, privately voice our concerns to the decision maker — Engage with them in a healthy debate to understand why the two of you have differing viewpoints.
When things go wrong, make it a point to do a post-mortem to identify what went wrong and what could you have done to prevent it.