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How To Think Like a Product Manager: Overcoming Cognitive Bias
As generalists, product managers have responsibilities across multiple disciplines with more breadth than depth in the core vertical disciplines of UX, tech and business. This breadth comes with many challenges.
One of the biggest of these challenges is having to understand and process conflicting information from different sources, whilst making key decisions which affect the future of a product and the business. This is why it’s important that product managers are able to think clearly. However, cognitive biases can complicate things.
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool.
- Richard Feynman, 1974
What is cognitive bias?
A cognitive bias is a systematic error in the way that you understand and use information. To be clear, I’m not talking about mistakes or slips that happen when you’re having an off day. It’s about getting stuff wrong, consistently, without really realising you’re doing it. They are mental traps that we fall into all the time. These traps reduce our ability to think critically and make reasoned decisions. They’re not all bad, of course.
