Have you heard? My new book Continuous Discovery Habits is now available. Get the product trio's guide to a structured and sustainable approach to continuous discovery. This post is part of a series about making better product decisions.
“The remarkable thing about your mental life is that you are rarely ever stumped.” – Daniel Kahneman
It’s Thursday morning. You settle into your office chair, you crack open your laptop, you take a deep breath as you watch the incoming messages pile up, and in a matter of seconds you are engrossed in work.
You’ve got 10 minutes before your first meeting to scan through dozens of emails. Is anything urgent? From their perspective? Everything is urgent.
One of the engineers reminds you that they still need the final assets for the latest feature they are building. You’ve got three different designs sitting in your inbox waiting for feedback before they can be prepped for production. You dig through your email, pull up the designs, make a quick decision, and ask the designer to send you the final assets.
As you are on your way to your meeting, you get a phone call from your Business Development manager. He wants to know if you think there’s any potential in partnering with so-and-so. You think about it as you walk into the conference room and decide, sure we have similar audiences, I’m sure we can figure out some type of integration. You hang up, hoping it doesn’t’ turn into a giant distraction.
The management meeting you just walked into is starting to get underway. It’s a headcount planning meeting and you are still on the fence about whether or not you need to replace the product manager who left last month. You quickly decide that you’d rather increase your design budget. You second guess yourself as you listen to the other department heads ask for resources. By the end, you forgo the product manager headcount, but you increase your design budget by 50%. It feels like a win.
Back at your desk, you get an email with the latest results from your current A/B tests. You’ve got two clear trend lines, but they seem at odds with each other. What does that mean? You are stumped for a few minutes. Suddenly, you realize there are 3 or 4 possible explanations. You start to design new tests for next week’s run.
Does this sound familiar?
As we build our products, we make countless decisions every day. What should you take away from that last user interview? What do you do with that customer request for features x, y, and z? Do you need to fix this bug right now? SEO traffic dropped overnight, now what?
You spend a lot of time fighting fires. Maybe once a quarter, you tackle the big strategic questions. On any given day, while it may feel like you are juggling a lot, you head home feeling pretty confident. You got this.
Or do you? It’s easy to feel like we are making the right decisions. Our brains are tremendously good at retroactively justifying decisions. And yet, so many products fail. So many startups never make it out of beta. What’s going on?
I don’t mean to rain on your parade, but decisions research shows that while it may feel like we are making good decisions, too often we simply aren’t. Fortunately, it’s not all bad, that same research can help us course correct.
Want to learn more? Come to the Startup Product Talks Meetup next Wednesday in San Francisco. Register for the event here.
This post is part of a series about making better product decisions.
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