5 Ways to Outsmart Your Brain and Make Better Product Decisions - Lean Agile Scotland 2014
When we build a product, we make thousands of decisions. We search for patterns, draw conclusions, and act upon limited information. It's all in a day's work. In this talk, I'll explore the 5 most common cognitive biases and how they mislead our product decisions. These include our tendency to value a user's experience more if it coincides with our own experience (confirmation bias) and our tendency to forget that our users are not experts (curse of knowledge). You’ll walk out of this talk with ways to identify when your cognitive bias is creeping into your decisions, as well as tips and tricks on how to outsmart your brain and make better product decisions. This talk is relevant for designers, product managers, developers, founders, managers, and anyone else who finds themselves making product decisions every day.
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5 Ways to Outsmart Your Brain and Make Better Product Decisions - Lean Agile Scotland 2014
- 1. 5 Ways to Outsmart Your Brain And Make Better Product Decisions Lauren Gilchrist (@lgilchrist) Lean Agile Scotland 2014
- 2. About Me • Product Manager at Pivotal Labs • 6 Years of Startups
- 3. Product Decisions are Hard • Extreme Uncertainty • Incomplete Information • Time Sensitive
- 4. We’re Good at Intuitive Decisions • System 1 • “Gut Instinct” or “Intuition”
- 5. We’re Pretty Good at Logic • System 2 • “Analytical” or “Logical”
- 6. But System 1 is Easily Distracted • Which Weighs More? • 100 Kilos of Bricks • 100 Kilos of Feathers
- 7. Anatomy of a Bad Decision • System 1 “blinks” • System 2 snoozes
- 8. How System 1 Causes Bad Product Decisions 1. Assumes Causation 2. Has Selective Hearing 3. Assumes Others Care 4. Assumes Others Know 5. Underestimates Time & Price
- 11. 1. Outsmart Causation Bias • Assume correlation, not causation • Focus on replicable outcomes • Fear what you can’t explain
- 12. 2. Has Selective Hearing
- 13. 2. Has Selective Hearing • Are users actually engaged for a full hour?
- 14. 2. Outsmart Confirmation Bias • If it sounds too good to be true, it is • Validate with your users • Validate with your peers
- 15. 3. Assumes Others Care “Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking about it.” - Daniel Kahneman
- 16. 3. Assumes Others Care
- 17. 3. Assumes Others Care
- 18. 3. Outsmart Focusing Effect • Use personas to remind you that you are not your user • Talk to your users
- 19. 4. Assumes Others Know
- 20. 4. Assumes Others Know • 50 Listeners, 50 Tappers • Tappers listen to a song and tap the beat • Listeners guess song • Half of tappers think listeners will guess the song correctly • 3% of listeners actually guess correctly
- 21. 4. Assumes Others Know
- 22. 4. Assume Others Know
- 23. 4. Outsmart Curse of Knowledge • Get out of the building!
- 24. 5. Underestimates Time & Price • Americans remodeling their kitchens expected the job to cost $18,658 • They ended up paying $38,769
- 25. 5. Underestimates Time & Price • “Estimate when you will finish your thesis” • 13% of the students finished by their 50% probable date • 19% finished by their 75% probable date • 45% (less than half!) finished by their 99% probable date
- 26. 5. How to Outsmart • Estimate complexity, not time • Estimate for others, not yourself • Estimate past actions
- 27. System 1 Affects Product Decisions 1. Causation Bias 2. Confirmation Bias 3. Focusing Effect 4. Curse of Knowledge 5. Planning Fallacy
- 28. How to Outsmart System 1 • Don't let yourself act on intuition • Think, don’t blink • Practice Lean Experiments
- 29. QUESTIONS?
- 30. Thank you! Lauren Gilchrist @lgilchrist lgilchrist@pivotal.io