Be Prepared To Be Wrong

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This post is part of a series about making better product decisions.

As startup founders, product managers, designers, it’s often easy for us to come up with all the answers. Should we add this feature? Will users take this action? Will changing this copy increase conversions?

And of course, we assume we are right.

It turns out that we are not the only ones. Nobel Prize-winning psychologist, Daniel Kahneman explains, “A remarkable aspect of your mental life is that you are rarely stumped.”

It’s easy for us to come up with answers. They feel so right. It’s not even hard to explain why.

But there’s a problem.

More often than not, we are wrong.

Don’t worry, I don’t mean just you. I mean all of us.

Thanks to cognitive science, behavioral economics, and decades of modern research, we are starting to get a handle on how our brains work. And more importantly, how they trick us into believing that we are right.

Dan and Chip Heath, in their book Decisive  summarize much of this research, outlining the four villains of decision making.

First, we look too narrowly at a problem. We ask should we do this OR this, when we should ask, how can we do this AND this.

Second, we look for evidence that supports our beliefs. Maybe you’ve heard of the confirmation bias.

Third, we let short-term emotions affect our decisions.

Fourth, we are overconfident. Of course, I’ve never met a founder, product manager, or designer who had this problem.

So what can we do?

We can be prepared to be wrong.

I write a lot about measuring outcomes, about drawing lines in the sand before you start building, and about being explicit about your hypotheses.

Why?

Because it’s way too easy to revise history. It’s way too easy to look back and decide that what happened is exactly what you expected to happen. It’s much harder to be honest with yourself and realize that what you are building may not be working.

But the faster we become aware something might not be working, the faster we can correct course and try again.

Too many people think that building products is all about having big ideas and making things. That’s part of it. But it’s this simple, if you want to be good at making products, you have to accept the fact that you are going to be wrong. Not occasionally. All the time.

You have to put the systems in place that help you catch when you are wrong so that you can course correct often. This is the hard part about building products.

I love this topic. Expect more from me on this soon.

What do you do to be prepared to be wrong? Please share in the comments. 

This post is part of a series about making better product decisions.