How Confirmation Bias Is Destroying Your Product

Essentially the most harmful phrases in product development are: “Our customers will love this.” I’ve heard this declaration in numerous product conferences, often adopted by months of engineering work and ending with the quiet disappointment of underwhelming consumer adoption. The perpetrator? Affirmation bias — our mind’s maddening tendency to hunt out info that helps what we already consider.

As product managers, we’re employed to make selections. We analyze markets, collect necessities and prioritize options. The issue is, as soon as we have developed a speculation about what users want, we begin filtering all incoming info via that lens. Ambiguous suggestions will get interpreted as supportive. Damaging suggestions will get labeled as “edge circumstances.” And step by step, we assemble an alternate actuality the place our product selections are all the time sensible.

Associated: How Entrepreneurs Can Overcome Confirmation Bias

The consumer analysis theater

“Consumer analysis theater” refers to going via the motions of speaking to customers with out really being open to having your assumptions challenged. You would possibly acknowledge these signs in your group:

• Cherry-picking constructive quotes from consumer periods whereas ignoring damaging patterns

• Asking main questions designed to elicit particular solutions

• Limiting your research to customers who already love your product

• Deciphering silence or confusion as settlement

• Dismissing damaging suggestions as “they only do not get it but”

Look, I get it. You’ve got already instructed your leaders and buyers concerning the wonderful characteristic roadmap. You’ve got employed engineers based mostly on sure technical assumptions. Your whole firm narrative is perhaps constructed round a selected imaginative and prescient of what customers need. Altering course feels not possible.

However staying on the doomed course is worse.

Associated: Do You Know What Your Customers Want? Are You Sure?

Breaking the bias cycle

So, how can we really repair this? How can we create processes that challenge our cherished assumptions as an alternative of reinforcing them? Listed here are some sensible approaches I’ve seen work:

1. Separate knowledge assortment from interpretation

One workforce I labored with adopted a follow the place the folks conducting consumer interviews weren’t allowed to interpret the outcomes. They may solely doc precisely what was stated. A separate workforce — one with out emotional funding in particular outcomes — would then analyze the transcripts. This diminished the tendency to listen to what they wished to listen to throughout interviews.

This separation creates a wholesome rigidity. The interview workforce focuses on asking good questions reasonably than main customers towards predetermined conclusions. The evaluation workforce spots patterns with out being influenced by customers’ tone or the interpersonal dynamics of the interview.

2. Actively search disconfirming proof

Make it somebody’s particular job to play devil’s advocate throughout analysis planning. This particular person needs to be asking: “How would possibly we disprove our speculation?” reasonably than “How can we validate our concept?”

For instance, as an alternative of asking “Would you utilize this characteristic?” strive “What would stop you from utilizing this characteristic?” The primary query nearly all the time will get a well mannered “sure.” The second provides you precise obstacles you may want to beat.

3. Take note of habits, not simply opinions

Customers are notoriously dangerous at predicting their very own future habits. They will enthusiastically let you know they’d undoubtedly use your new characteristic, however when it launches, they keep on with their outdated habits.

I’ve discovered it rather more beneficial to look at what customers really do reasonably than what they are saying they’re going to do. This implies analyzing usage data from present options, creating prototype experiences the place customers can exhibit preferences via actions, and conducting area research the place you watch customers of their pure setting.

4. Create a tradition that rewards altering course

In case your workforce will get punished for admitting they had been fallacious, guess what? They are going to double down on dangerous concepts reasonably than acknowledge the necessity to pivot.

Good corporations construct ceremonies that commemorate studying and adjustment. Some startups have carried out “Pivot Events” — precise celebrations when the workforce made a significant course correction based mostly on consumer insights. They actually popped champagne after they killed options that analysis confirmed would not succeed. This despatched a strong message: Studying is valued over cussed persistence.

5. Diversify your analysis members

Should you solely discuss to your most enthusiastic customers, you are creating an echo chamber. Be certain your analysis consists of:

• Potential customers who selected competitor merchandise

• Former customers who deserted your product

• Present customers who hardly ever have interaction along with your product

• Customers from completely different demographics and use circumstances

This variety helps expose blind spots in your understanding.

Associated: 3 Cognitive Pitfalls That Are Ruining Your Business — How to Unravel the Biases in Decision-Making

The paradox of experience

This is the painful fact: The extra skilled you might be in your area, the extra inclined you turn out to be to affirmation bias. You’ve got seen patterns earlier than. You’ve got developed instinct. Generally that is extremely beneficial. Different occasions, it makes you dangerously overconfident.

The answer is not to disregard your expertise. It is to pair your hard-earned instinct with rigorous processes that check your assumptions. The perfect product leaders I do know have robust convictions loosely held. They make daring bets based mostly on their experience, however they’re fast to regulate when proof contradicts their preliminary hypotheses.

In the long run, the market does not care about your sensible imaginative and prescient or your elegant resolution. It solely cares in the event you’ve solved a real problem in a approach that matches into customers’ lives. And the one strategy to know that for positive is to continually problem what you assume you recognize about your customers.