Life as a product manager - or as an entrepreneur who also wears the product manager hat - is full of stressful questions along the line of “Who is my target customer?” and “What do they really want?”
As a product and UX/UI designer, I try to help clients minimize their guesses, but sometimes you can’t avoid it. So you make the most educated guess you can, based on the information at hand. Educated guessing is a necessary part of operating in business; when we do it consciously we often get good results. But when we let our unconscious biases and fears guide our actions, or we mistake these biases for clear logic and real world feedback - that’s when we get ourselves into trouble.
The danger of cognitive shortcuts
Our brains are constantly making subconscious guesses about what to do in situations where we don’t have 100% of the information we need. These instinctive little cognitive shortcuts - known as heuristics - are so natural to our thought processes that when we use them we don’t even realize that we got to our conclusion through a shortcut.
(Please do read Daniel Kahnmann’s brilliant book, Thinking, Fast and Slow on heuristics and their impact in our personal and business lives.)
Sometimes shortcuts are not a big problem. When you choose to give a bouquet of roses as a Mother’s Day gift because you “know” Mom would love roses, it doesn’t really matter if it is in fact because thousands of media mentions have cemented an association (a “shortcut”) in your brain between roses and Mother’s Day. Even if your mother would have preferred a motorcycle jacket, she’ll probably forgive you.
But if you make a product or UX design decision because you “know” that the customer needs it or you “know” that the customer will love it, you should be very careful about identifying how you know what you know. If your knowledge is coming from a bias or a shortcut, your customers will not be as forgiving as your Mom.
Jumping to conclusions… and missing the boat
Cathlyn (*not her real name, just a real incident) discovered how unforgiving customers can be. A finance professional, Cathlyn knew that the market was ready for a new solution to help women manage their finances. She had researched and found that women, on average, were able to save and invest far less capital than their male counterparts. She scoured consumer banking reports that outlined this fact. She knew that her income was lower than her partner’s and she saved less. So Cathlyn decided to act.
She created an online platform, all in pink and pastel purple, and a bank card to match. She drafted content that was going to speak directly to women. Cathlyn was sure her target audience would gravitate toward her system because clearly the current, male-oriented system wasn't working for them.
What happened? Cathlyn’s target audience found her offering insulting and panned it immediately, necessitating a pivot.
It happens all the time. In an example that’s been in the public spotlight, Quibi raised $1.7B in 2019-2020 to create a media network for streaming short form content on phones. They paid hundreds of millions of dollars to develop new content with celebrities like Chrissy Teigen and Reese Witherspoon, creating TV series where each chapter was 5-10 minutes long.
What knowledge were the Quibi founders acting on?
They knew that people have short attention spans. Check.
They knew that people spend short bursts of time on their phones each day, including watching videos on social platforms, Check.
They knew that people like to watch their favorite celebrities. Check.
What could go wrong?
The company promptly tanked, shutting down seven months after launch, when 90% of the company’s free trial members didn’t hang on past the one-month mark. In addition to challenges caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, many insiders agree that the company banked everything on an assumption that didn’t hold enough water to justify a paid subscription: that people preferred watching TV and films on a phone as an ideal way to consume content.
Quibi was product-focused (driven by their own assumptions about technology) rather than customer-focused (driven by direct feedback from users). The gaps in their knowledge and the assumptions that bridged those gaps did them in.
The magic question: “How do I know that?”
Great product managers, CPO’s and entrepreneurs, on the other hand, are fantastic at identifying true gaps in their knowledge, as well as dangerous biases lurking in their assumptions.
You can be, too.
It all comes from being unrelenting in the application of one question: “How do I know that?”
Let’s see this in action. Imagine you are a product manager tasked with deciding where your team should spend the next quarter focusing. You are convinced that you should spend the time developing a new feature that will help your customers organize their files better. Why did you make this choice? You say: because I know it is a problem for our customer base!
But now it’s time for the magic question. How do you know that?
Ask 10 different people in this position, and you’re likely to hear 10 different answers, including:
I know it’s a problem because I have it! It’s annoying.
My brother has this problem, so I’ve seen it.
My wife has told me it’s a problem.
Industry reports say that many people suffer from this problem now.
I conducted user research and customers told me they have this problem.
I combed through usage data from my company that points to the existence of this problem.
I read about data from other companies that shows the existence of this problem.
My manager told me this problem exists.
My manager said I have to study this problem, so it must exist.
I don’t know how I know, but I just feel very strongly that this problem exists.
Which of these answers are likely to lead a product manager to a great outcome this quarter? Which are not?
Don’t let your gut masquerade as your brain
Acting based on guesses - educated or uneducated - isn’t as much of a problem if you’re aware that it is a guess.
Jeff Bezos famously asserts that “most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around 70% of the information you wish you had.” If you wait any longer, your competitors will get ahead of you.
What’s equally important is to know HOW you know that 70%...
Let’s revisit Cathlyn’s pink and purple banking platform. Clearly, Cathlyn did know part of the story before she began, but what she didn’t know was more important: that women didn’t want to be singled out as female by their financial services. It made them feel vulnerable, and it seemed condescending, as if claiming they weren’t on par with men.
What if Cathlyn had applied the magic question to her initial conviction: HOW did she know that the market was ready for a new solution? And, how did she know that women wanted a different women-only bank? The question might have led her to speak with women in her target market and discover exactly what problems they were having and how they wanted - and didn’t want - them solved. Taking this route, Cathlyn might have come up with a less tone-deaf solution that wasn’t based on the idea that women wanted a separate bank from their male peers.
Be a healthy skeptic
Most people instinctively feel that what they know firsthand carries more weight and is more “true” than secondhand information. In addition, in the absence of good firsthand information, many people are happy to act purely based on second- and thirdhand information, or even pure conjecture, especially when it comes in the form of a directive from an authority figure.
As product managers, designers, creatives and user researchers, it is our job to constantly challenge assumptions like these if we want better outcomes for our efforts.
We should constantly be questioning what we know when it is sourced in secondhand information, however reliable it may be. In the tech world, industry reports or media reports from your field are definitely second- and third- hand information! Don’t mistake them to be more important than what you have observed yourself. They are never good substitutes for hitting the pavement and doing your own research.
So don’t take shortcuts without realizing it: Reveal guesses for what they are and let “How do I know what I know?” accompany you everywhere you make critical decisions. Your users will love you for it. (Your mom might, too.)
This post has been published on www.productschool.com communities.