Mental Traps: Your Cognitive Biases May Be Hurting Your Product
Back in 2015, I was consulting a company in online publishing and marketing that had one successful product and many failed attempts to bring new products to market. Their original product was an unplanned success — some effort, long hours, key expertise available at their disposal and perfect timing. When they were overtaken by success, they believed that they discovered a magical formula of creating winning products. They meticulously followed the same routine, but all their attempts failed. They kept at it, but to no avail. I was brought on board to give advice on bringing their new product idea to life. After talking to one of the founders, I observed that he was subject to a well-established bias — over-confidence effect — when your subjective belief that your judgment is correct is way more optimistic and stronger than the reality. Anchored to their past success, the management team firmly believed that they knew what it takes to bring any product to market irrespective of contextual and project-related nuances. Any initiative was doomed to fail unless the management team adopted a more inclusive thinking.
This is just one of the biases among myriad of biases that could cripple your product development and management effort. I would like to list 4 that I personally believe are most ubiquitous, as well as detrimental.
1- Over-confidence effect
In product management, this bias is best manifested in how we plan and estimate effort. If you have a person on your team (or perhaps it’s you?) who constantly believes that she definitely knows what is right and what is wrong — then she may be in the grip of over-confidence illusion. Or if you ever missed a deadline on a project because of poor effort estimation, then this could also be it. This bias is blamed for some of the biggest economic bubbles, wars, conflicts, failures of humanity. People firmly believe that they know when they actually know nothing. Just like Jon Snow.
Curious fact from studies on overconfidence is that we tend to rate our own skills and performance much better than of others. This experiment has been replicated many times, even in my MBA class on decision-making, and the findings are always consistent. Majority of people rate themselves above average compared to others. Just think about it for a second, if everybody is above average, who is then average or below it?
Following the same logic, we always believe that we are better drivers, teachers, entrepreneurs, product managers compared to others. This thinking leads us to give more value to our ideas and less weight to what people around us are suggesting. Over-confidence effect is also responsible for thinking that in the ‘4 out 5 startups fail within a year’ statement, you are the startup that proudly makes it through.
2- Availability heuristic
Think about the following question: What is the most dangerous and immediate threat to humanity around the world right now? Probably what came to your mind is either ISIS or perhaps Trump if you are in the US (I could argue that the latter is actually sooo real though). If I asked this question last summer, your answer could be Ebola. Back then the panic overwhelmed people so much that if you asked them about which virus posed more danger — Ebola or Flu, majority would most probably pick the former. In fact, flu took way more lives globally in 2014–2015 than Ebola even infected people.
You got it right — it is the availability heuristic clouding your judgment. Esgate, Groomie and Baker define it in the Introduction to Applied Cognitive Psychology as:
“A mental shortcut that relies on immediate examples that come to a given person’s mind when evaluating a specific topic, concept, method or decision. The availability heuristic operates on the notion that if something can be recalled, it must be important, or at least more important than alternative solutions which are not as readily recalled.”
A key takeaway here is that what instantly comes to your mind is not always the most important or relevant answer. Perhaps that idea that you heroically stood for in the last product discussion was not as important as you thought. You might have just ranked it as a top priority because of easy retrieval.
3- Confirmation bias
This one is quite straightforward — we tend to favor the information that confirms our thoughts or beliefs. If I give you a large excel file full of customer data, there are plenty of ways to analyze those numbers. If you want to prove something in the first place, you can easily see and interpret only the portion of the data that confirms your belief.
“Confirmation bias, also called confirmatory bias ormyside bias, is the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms one’s preexisting beliefs or hypotheses, while giving disproportionately less consideration to alternative possibilities.” (Plous, Scott (1993). The Psychology of Judgment and Decision Making. p. 233.)
So next time you are analyzing the results of the A/B test or customer behavior data, ask yourself — aren’t you trying to confirm what you already believe in instead of looking for objective insights?
4 — IKEA effect
IKEA effect is one of my favorite biases that I have seen in action many times in life. It is about the tendency to assign more value to ideas that we generate ourselves compared to other people’s ideas (or effort). By assembling the IKEA furniture ourselves, we tend to value it more than just a piece of furniture we bought already assembled.
In the office setting, this effect is manifested in discussions about resource allocation or setting priorities. People working on projects may feel more protective of them than people outside those projects. This is a sword with two edges — it may be that people working on the project are blinded because of being attached to the project. Or it may be that people outside the project describe it in such words that hurt project team’s morale and motivation because outsiders do not feel so strongly about it.
To sum it up: so next time you are setting personal or team priorities, ask yourself — is this important because I think it is important or are there objective reasons behind my decision? Am I falling prey to any of the mental traps described in this post? Research shows that remembering the existence of such mental traps already decreases their effect by up to 50%.
Further Reading:
Wikipedia: overconfidence effect
