Take those problem statements to your team and try and see how you can solve it more creatively or economically.Ī more difficult problem to deal with is the ideas that come from inside your organization, particularly what is known as the HiPPO problem(Highest Paid Person’s Opinion). Customers might not be good problem solvers, but they are very good at understanding their pain - and chances are if they have it, some of your other customers will too. Steer them into redefining their feature request into a statement about the problem they have. When your customer comes to you with a problem it will often be in the form of “wouldn’t it be good if the product did X”. Don’t believe others’ eitherĬustomers are experts in their problems but often poor at knowing the best way to solve them. This can help to insulate you from the emotional fallout if your idea turns out to be wrong because that investment is shared equally with your team. One of the other advantages of involving others is you decouple the value of the idea from your self-worth when you build an idea collaboratively. Involve others as soon as possible, and ideally act on the idea quickly without a lot of upfront design and planning to see whether it’s good or not. One of the lessons of cross-functional teams is that by involving expertise from product, design, and engineering at the early stages you are more likely to steer ideas in a better direction than if a product manager writes a big and complicated spec and hands it to the team to implement. If people are telling you your idea is a bad one, or even that there is a better way to do it, then they are probably right. Experience is unsurprisingly a better teacher than your imagination. Don’t spend a long time planning and investigating act and learn. According to Bloomberg, 8 out of 10 innovations fail which might imply a disconnect between customer and the productĪbout half your ideas will be wrong, so go filter out the wrong ones as early as possible by trying them out. These gut instincts should all be valued because they are an important part of the creative process, but the secret is not to overinvest in them. You may engage with a particular idea because you think it will excite your customers or because it will open up new markets, or simply because it has some other ineffable quality that your brain hasn’t fully processed yet. It’s important to understand that when you have a “great” idea you are having an emotional reaction based on your perceived notion of what “great” is. If you spend a lot of time researching and planning an idea, admitting you are wrong is tough because you have invested a lot of your intellectual and emotional capital in reaching the wrong outcome. It’s important to recognize that not all the sunk cost is in the time you spent developing something - a big part of it is the emotional investment you spent thinking about it. Keep it simple, take feedback and decide whether to continue to invest then iterate and re-evaluate. Directed Discovery teaches us to get as close to the customer as possible (respecting social distancing guidelines, of course). Use design and well-framed questions, perhaps a prototype or implement a simplified version of your idea in your product and see if people use it. Customers (and people in general) struggle at knowing what they want, and need to see and touch something tangible before they can see what works and what doesn’t. This goes further than just talking to your customers in general about whether they want it. Knowing when you should be prepared to cut your losses is a mark of maturity in product development and one that even the most experienced product manager will frequently struggle with. Think carefully about how you will validate your idea, and invest the absolute minimum you can get away with to do it. By iterating in rapid cycles with fast feedback, we can recognise an idea that is simply not resonating and adjust our parameters or abandon it. Lean principles and design thinking teach us to invest the minimum to produce something viable which can be used to evaluate our future investment. Lower the cost you sinkĪn excellent way to avoid the sunk cost fallacy is not to sink the cost in the first place. In product development, this shows itself in the difficulty of realising when you’ve over-invested in an idea - or continued to invest in a good one past the point where the effort exceeds its returns. A particularly insidious one is the sunk cost fallacy - the tendency to double-down on something because we spent a lot of time and effort making it. Did the UK Government fall for sunk-cost fallacy? A question that came to mind following an article published on the BBC which looked at the timeline of events of what went wrong with the contact tracing app.Ĭognitive biases.
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