How to Be a Persuasive Product Manager by reddit Director of Product
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Product Management Event Held at the Product Conference in San Francisco. Tyler Odean, Director of Product at Reddit, gave an introduction to our cognitive biases and the psychology of decision making (drawing heavily from Thinking Fast & Slow) to help frame a set of practical tips and tricks for making your arguments as persuasive as possible. Being effective as a Product Manager requires influence without authority - convincing a broad portfolio of stakeholders to work together on a shared vision.
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How to Be a Persuasive Product Manager by reddit Director of Product
- 1. How to Be a Persuasive Product Manager by reddit Director of Product www.productschool.com
- 3. Our lived experience is comprised of two separate and distinct systems. (this is an oversimplification, but a useful one) System #1 fast and cheap, but error prone System #2 precise, but expensive and slow
- 4. System #1 System #2 Fast Effortless Involuntary Black/White Approximate Confident Slow Effortful Deliberate Nuanced Precise Skeptical
- 5. System #1 System #2 Fast Effortless Involuntary Black/White Approximate Confident Slow Effortful Deliberate Nuanced Precise Skeptical
- 7. Even if you understand an optical illusion, it isn’t possible to unsee it. Cognitive illusions operate the same way. You can’t outsmart them.
- 10. Availability causes ideas that come to mind easily to seem more true. Feels Vivid Recent Frequent Clear Display Good Mood Familiar Common Likely Good True
- 11. Availability is why advertising works. Feels Vivid Recent Frequent Clear Display Good Mood Familiar Common Likely Good True
- 12. … and why heavy news coverage makes us overestimate risks. Feels Vivid Recent Frequent Clear Display Good Mood Familiar Common Likely Good True
- 13. Availability can also operate in reverse. Feels Vague Diffuse Hard to picture Unknown Bad Mood Foreign Rare Unlikely Bad False
- 15. We estimate things by anchoring on a reference value as a starting point. Adjusting from the anchor is effortful, so we tend to err in that direction.
- 16. We also experience anchoring from readily available comparisons. Web - $59 Web & Print - $125 Web - $59 Print - $125 Web & Print - $125
- 18. System #1 isn’t great at math, so we evaluate packages and outcomes by estimating a representative norm rather than as a sum. SET A SET B WHEN WE COMPARE VALUE DIRECTLY $ < $$ WHEN WE ESTIMATE VALUE SEPARATELY $$ > $
- 20. A desire for coherence also causes us to ignore contradictions, which causes the Halo Effect and is why this sentence is uncomfortable: Hitler loved puppies
- 21. Coherence also gives us Confirmation Bias - changing our minds is effortful because it requires overcoming the inconsistency with our past selves. CHAINSAWSUIT.COM
- 23. Framing effects can make us perceive the same circumstances differently, depending on how the information is presented.
- 24. Organ donation consent rate by country Framing determines what choice is seen as default or normal. Deviating from normal is more effortful and we also perceive it as riskier. opt-in vrs opt-out
- 26. Keep it simple Weak arguments weaken strong ones One thesis at a time
- 27. Never surprise anyone Introduce ideas like you would cats: slowly at first, and in limited ways
- 28. Make it easy to agree Make your preferred choice the default Don’t leave behind open questions
- 29. Control the COMPARISONS Dial up or down emphasis by making things more concrete or abstract Keep flattering comparisons close, remove unflattering ones entirely
- 30. Argue as little as possible Agree as often as you can Ignore disagreements that don’t matter
- 31. Argue forwards, not backwards Easier to argue new information changes things than that old assessments were wrong.
- 32. Play the Long Game Be prepared to be persuaded Leave some meat on the bone
- 34. Part-time Product Management Courses in San Francisco, Silicon Valley, Los Angeles, New York, Austin, Boston, Seattle, Chicago, Denver, London, Toronto www.productschool.com
Editor's Notes
- Let’s get started! I’m Tyler. I’m a Director of Product leading the Knowledge team at Reddit, but I’d like to open up today not by talking to you about what I do, but by talking to you about how I do it. Being a product manager is about leading through influence. To thrive you need to be more than right - you need to be convincing. And to do that you need to understand how we think.
- All the psychology I’ll be talking about today is from T, F&S by Kahneman. I’m not going to have time to do a lot of citations unfortunately - if you want to learn more pretty much everything I will reference is from this book. The central conceit is that our psychological experience is comprised of two systems: System #1: which is a heuristic driven system, fast and cheap but error prone and always ready with an answer even when it shouldn’t be System #2: smart and precise, but requires sustained effort and attention and doesn’t always check System #1 as carefully as it should
- System #2 is the kind of thinking that takes place at the speed of the voice in our head. It’s how we *think* we think, because it’s the part of our thinking that we are actually aware of. But it is actually only the minority of our cognitive experience - we can’t sustain it for long and it becomes more difficult if we’re distracted or tired or stressed. System #1 on the other hand cannot be turned off and is operating all the time, beneath our range of notice. It operates a bit like the way a child views the world: in terms of cause / effect stories, with black-and-white rules and total certainty. I’m obviously simplifying a bit here, but to be clear this is not pop psychology: you can measure very distinctly when people engage System #2. Pupils dilate, heart rate changes, perspiration increases. Thinking hard is literally hard work. Systems #1 and #2 are different in a lot of ways, but one of these distinctions is especially critical for our purposes today, which is ...
- … the last one. System #1 is the source of belief, and System #2 the source of vigilance and skepticism. That means it’s not enough to have a logically sound argument. You have to have an argument that *feels* good, or no one will believe you anyway. If you’ve ever heard someone explain something to you and afterwards thought to yourself “I don’t know why you’re wrong but I still don’t believe you” that is the feeling of someone communicating to your System #2 but neglecting System #1. To be truly persuasive we need to communicate to System #1 - to our intuitive selves. So we’re going to focus today on how to make your message appealing to System #1.
- The most important thing to remember about cognitive illusions is that understanding them does not diminish their effect. No matter how much you understand about optics, the snakes still seem to move. You can’t undo the effect of the optical illusion because that’s how your eye works. Cognitive illusions are the same way. You can’t use your brain to outsmart your brain. Neither can your audience. The biases we’ll talk about today are universal and they are universally powerful.
- There are, of course, many biases - but for our purposes today there are five basic ones I think are worth understanding.
- Availability is, broadly, how easy a thing is to think of. We tend to believe things that are easy to picture, easy to imagine, easy to remember are more likely to be true.
- Easier to read (bold font): more likely to be true. Easier to remember (rhymes): more likely to be true. Judges more likely to grant parole after than before lunch.
- This is where “not invented here” syndrome comes from and a lot of x-PA distrust.
- Anchoring is the tendency to overweight the first value we consider when making an estimate.
- System #1 will happily anchor to any arbitrary value, because System #1 doesn’t weigh evidence it merely activates associations. It is up to System #2 to adjust our estimates away from that initial anchor - but adjustment is effortful, so we’re more likely to do too little of it than too much - which means the anchor drags our estimates around. The effect of anchoring is ~40-55% in lab settings - more when we are tired or distracted. What’s even scarier is that it works no matter how bad the anchor is. I can remind you about how anchoring works, tell you to be careful not to anchor, tell you I’m about to show you a random number and then spin a wheel right in front of you to choose which number to show you and that number will still end up anchoring your guesses.
- Anchoring isn’t always this obvious. It can be caused by the presence of an easy comparison, as in this study by Dan Ariely of the Economist. The presence of an ‘ugly wing friend’ made the web & print option more attractive than it was on it’s own. These ‘false choices’ are obviously worse and hence flatter the similar but obviously better option.
- Representation is our tendency to avoid doing mental math and instead remember a ‘typical example’ and judge the value of a set based on that.
- The real experiment was done with a set of dishes but I couldn’t find good images for that, so don’t take this too literally. This ‘representative norm’ is why piling more excuses or more arguments on becomes less convincing. People don’t intuitively sum the arguments, they average them out. That means that adding additional items to a set can actually reduce its perceived value. Like piling on a list of mediocre excuses instead of just choosing one good one.
- Coherence is our desire for a consistent universe, where things are essentially themselves and everything has a reason.
- Coherence also causes us to ignore/downplay contradictions, and instead to assume that people are consistent: brave people are brave in all circumstances, smart people are smart in all circumstances. In reality of course, people are complicated. We don’t compartmentalize our opinions well, so we tend to assume people/ideas who are bad in some regard are bad in all regards and vice versa. Psychologists call this Halo Effect, though at Google I hear it more described as “flipping the bit” on something. To experience this bias in yourself, consider the following sentence: The inconsistency of history’s greatest monster showing any traces of relatability or kindness so violates our expectations of coherence that it is literally difficult to conceive.
- Coherence also underwrites why it’s hard to change our minds. Mistakes are inconsistent with our narratives of ourselves as smart, capable individuals. Confirmation bias is why first impressions matter, including for ideas
- Framing refers to the fact that the context in which we see a choice or a piece of information can deeply color how we interpret it.
- These headlines are logically equivalent, but they evoke very different associated imagery. The left evokes France and loss, the right Italy and victory. But System #1 is involuntary and associative, so we can’t help but experience these two presentations very differently. Framing is why we’d rather undergo an operation with a 90% survival rate than a 10% mortality rate.
- Probably the most important aspect of framing for our purposes is that it defines what is seen as the ‘default’ option. Deviating from normal is effortful because we intuitively assign more risk, blame and regret to acting than failing to act As a result, the default option is a powerful natural tie-break, as is suggested by this graph of organ donation rate by opt-in vrs opt-out countries. Even in a seemingly sensitive decision like organ donation most people are content to let the form tell them what the normal choice is.
- OK: now to the heart of the matter. Five simple rules to help you adjust your arguments to make them as convincing as possible. Remember, rhetorical gimmicks like these are like make-up. Applied judiciously and they can flatter our best attributes and minimize our drawbacks, applied excessively and they can make us look clownish, and no matter how carefully applied they won’t make a pig beautiful. These are handy parlour tricks, not a substitute for good arguments and reasoning.
- Availability bias means the less there is to remember, the more convincing your argument will be. Less is more! Like comedy you want a lean setup and a rush to the punchline. Representativeness also encourages aggressive trimming: your audience will remember the average weight of your arguments, rather than the total weight. Stick to the highlight reel. Remember this especially with slide decks - the image behind me is basically a visual chant. System #1 can’t help reading it, which means it’s echoing over and over in your audience’s heads. Make sure it’s reinforcing and not distracting from your message. Think of it like the chorus of a song. It should be simple and catchy.
- Advertise your ideas before you sell them! Availability bias means more frequently your audience has thought about an idea in the past the less threatening it will be. Bring it up in casual, non-confrontational ways. Be transparent about controversial ideas (let people know it’s coming, preview your arguments in 1:1s, send out agendas, have outlines in slide decks, etc) - don’t try and bury the lede. Even people who disagree with you will find those disagreements less frustrating if they are never ambushed by the arguments you present.
- Place the onus of action on disagreement by making your preferred option the status quo: “absent any feedback, the plan is to …” or “if no one objects, we’ll …” etc. Leaving open questions behind feels like it increases your option value (we can ship the widgets in either red or green, whichever you prefer!) but it actually makes that option less concrete / vivid, and thus less available and more effort to consider. You should instead make your preferred choice as specific as you can by providing answers for any open questions. Open questions embedded into options you don’t care for, on the other hand, are totally fine.
- Mind the clarity/legibility of your arguments. Harder to read: harder to believe. If you want something to seem important, express it in a specific, concrete narrative. If you want to downplay something, express it in a vague, abstract way Control your denominators. If you want something to seem large, choose the smallest reasonable denominator. If you want something to seem small, choose the largest reasonable denominator. Make sure every obvious comparison flatters your preferred outcome. Otherwise, remove it.
- Some people approach persuasion like a competitive game where they are seeking to score the most points against their opponent, but that’s to be blunt, pretty dumb. You can bully someone into getting out of your way but you can’t bully them into agreeing with you. Persuasion is not a hostile takeover. Agreeing with someone invokes the halo effect: If you agree with them you must be smart which means you must have a point about other things you have to say. Disagreeing with someone does the same thing in reverse: every time you disagree with someone you become less worth listening to. That’s why you should ignore any disagreements outside the immediate context of what you’re trying to convince them of. Argue as narrowly as possible. Find and state out loud the smallest list of premises that mark the disagreement between you and another party, and then seek to reduce that list further if possible.
- Remember coherence makes it tremendously difficult to rationalize the idea of you having been previously wrong. It is *not* however incoherent for you to have believed (A) and then learned something new and now believe (B). Arguing that new information changes things is orders of magnitude easier than arguing that previous beliefs were wrong. So if you want to convince a team to stop working on something, you don’t argue their OKRs are low priority. Instead, argue that their are new targets that are even *higher* priority. This is why we tend to see priority inflation over time, by the way.
- Remember that careers are long and meetings are short. Winning every argument isn’t necessarily the best outcome. You want others to perceive you as an ally with a different view, not as an enemy to be defeated. To do that, you’ll need to think the same way about them. So make sure you leave room to change your mind - or to accommodate other viewpoints even if you don’t personally share them.