How to be a better product Manager using Mental Models?
Being Operations Guy working at an early-stage startup to working for a Growth stage startup, Been a founder before and also had privileged to work with many founders closely and have seen the company grow. Also at times, I have also seen the companies blow. I have learned a lot from my journey. I have come across various decision-making matrices throughout the journey and also Bias that are often created among founders, CTO’s and Investors. Even at times, I have struggled with this bias. People confuse the bias often with the Founder’s Ego or company being run by the head of product.
“Major arguements or disagreement arise due to bais and often keep your team away from doing what is really important, But how would you know what is important and why would your users or people care about it”.
The Bad part of Bias is it becomes extremely difficult to think clearly through, as bias becomes a more integral part that it builds up over time and can lead the team to solve wrong problems.
Types of Cognitive Bias
What is Bias?
Ans:- Bias is disproportionate weight in favor of or against an idea or thing, usually in a way that is closed-minded, prejudicial, or unfair. Biases can be innate or learned.
How does it affect you?
If You are an entrepreneur:- You will lean towards a particular fact more which leads to overconfidence bias towards a particular set of users or group, Which gives you the confidence to think that your product will work towards a particular set of users and they will be inclined to use it every day, without building any hypothesis towards it which proves it.
Ex:- You come from a health background and have work experience of 5–10 years. Lately, you come up with an idea that will help surgeons in overcoming a particular set of problems. Without developing any Prototype or MVP or even doing any user research among the target group you tend to come up with the final product thinking it will be used and should help solve their problems is called Overconfidence Bias.
If you are a Product Manager:- Stop your A/B Testing as soon as you see what you want. confirmation basis is very common among product managers. Once you have proved what you want you to stop doing it.
Ex-You’s working on a product improvement project. You have a solid idea of what the project entails but want to gather more insight, so you head to the customer success world to gather user feedback. Searching support tickets for comments on the specific product feature, you’re pleased to find numerous complaints about it. You feel you have ample evidence that proves the improvement you’re developing is the right thing to be working on. You tend to listen to the users who agree with you.
If you are a Product strategy Lead:- Strategy leads are the ones who think about long-term perspectives and understand the market very well before launching any product or any new vertical. Every piece of information consumed by-product strategy is often anchored to facts and data. But oftentimes they would get anchored to certain biases before making any decisions. such bias to certain data often leads to anchoring biases.
How to overcome Bias and what mental tools can be used by Product managers to build enough clarity of the problem before solving them?
Second-Order Thinking
Outlining the worst scenarios that could be when implementing a feature or a product first and then thinking on the best things that could happen if implemented solution. This allows your mind to think on all the negative consequences first and then jump on positive aspects.
1st order consequences allow you to think on various positive aspects first and then over negative aspects, The solutions which derive from 1st order thinking are often Biased towards the good part first leaving no or little scope on Bad consequences.
2nd and 3rd order thinking increases your thinking ability and allows you more scope for better decision making without being bias towards any good part of Bad part.
Probabilistic Thinking (How to think in Bets )
As a product manager if you are working on any new feature then there is always 2 outcomes.
- ) Positive outcome: — Users are doing exactly what you and your team thought so.
- ) Negative outcome:- Users drifting away or never using the feature which you and your team have built.
By applying probabilistic thinking you can avoid overconfidence bias and optimism bias and can create 3rd outcome as favorable outcomes.
Favorable outcomes are expected outcomes that are very close to what you desired and with a few tweaks, you can make it a more positive outcome for the users. Probabilistic thinking allows you to build a feature or product which is closer to what the user wants and could be a potential problem.
Confidence Meter:- Let's first try to understand various confidence levels users might have and the potential want them to use it. The confidence level is a scoring matrix that allows you to give a confidence score for each feature that you are working on.
Impact Levels (Higher Impact, Higher chances to be favorable)
Higher the impact and most favorable the product will be used by users and chances of getting it right is very high. Impact levels help you understand what sort of impact will the users get once they start using the desired feature or the product. The higher the impact for any feature the more it becomes favorable for the user to use it.
Effort levels
Effort levels are generally how much effort will your engineering team will put into practice building the feature, the Goal is to build features that are having high impacts with the lowest of the efforts. Thus building the low-hanging fruits first then focussing on building high effort level features.
Inversion thinking:- Inversion is a practice of negative visualization and addressing problems backward. For example, instead of thinking about achieving success in X, you think about achieving failure in X. You then list everything you can think of that can help you fail.
Let's say you what to quit a habit how can you do so following inverse thinking.
“Whats hold true to quit the habit which has been followed for a long time”.
I want to quit this habit because it's not good for me. (This statement holds true)
Sticking to habits can be tough. You can apply inversion to realize the potential roadblocks.
Most Importantly while applying any of the above mental models always choose the right stakeholder to be in the meeting. Also do not discuss problems and solutions both in the same meeting.
One meeting for problem discussion and another one for solutions.
As a product manager, your primary role is to bring clarity out of all the chaos may that be the engineering complex, design team, or sales/ Marketing team. Bringing clarity enables you to make better decisions and create favorable effects for your products. It avoids the trap of getting biased towards certain problems and not looking beyond them clearly. Using the above mental models can help you to identify the right biases and solve them on day to day basis.
