PRODUCTHEAD is a regular newsletter of product management goodness,
curated by Jock Busuttil.
i am product insane #
every PRODUCTHEAD edition is online for you to refer back to
tl;dr
Consensus bias can make it feel uncomfortable to consider other perspectives
It’s more important than ever to understand the why of a feature before shipping it
You can use AI agents to triage feature requests, but a human has to make the decision on what to build
hello
I visited a wilfully perverse coffee shop the other day. Instead of the familiar menu of flat whites, cortados and cappuccinos was a more stark taxonomy. Coffees all started with a double espresso, leaving the customer to specify only the quantity of either steamed milk or hot water. The coffee shop had effectively shifted the requirement to know the coffee recipe from the barista to the customer. Someone had invented an open source coffee shop.
Of course, the place was packed. This was in Cambridge after all, so perhaps this style of ordering suited the big-brained clientele better than muggle interlopers like me. But part of me also felt that I shouldn’t be getting a funny look for asking for a flat white in a coffee shop.
My experience reminded of the occasional frustration I would experience working with software engineers. Sometimes I would have the temerity to suggest that we could perhaps make it easier to accomplish a particular task in the product, only to be scoffed at by the developers on the team who had committed to muscle memory each of the 15 steps required, and who failed to understand why I was complaining. “Works for me,” they’d say as I left the room to scream.
This isn’t meant to be a jab at developers. But it does highlight that usability is in the eye of the beholder (or something). It’s easier to understand why people resist change when we understand that they may not see a problem with the status quo. It works – nay, makes perfect sense to them as it is – so why change it?
Part of this may be attributable to a lack of experience and thus empathy with others who don’t see or approach problems in the same way as they do. If they’ve never seen something done a different way before, they may not be alive to that possibility. Another possible explanation is consensus bias. Being around people who think in similar ways to us and share a similar worldview boosts our sense of belonging and self-esteem, so we can be prone to believing that others share our way of thinking more than is actually the case.
This could explain why some of the teams I’ve worked with in the past have baulked at participating in user research: a low inclination to meet new people may have been a factor; it may also have been that the prospect of discovering not everyone thought in the same way as them would have been uncomfortable.
None of this is an argument against seeking to understand perspectives other than our own. It’s still a valuable activity. It is however useful to remember that not everyone relishes the prospect of doing so.
Speak to you soon,
Jock
what to think about this week
How to turn 1000 pull requests a day into the few your customers need
Last week, Karri Saarinen, CEO of Linear, shared his frustration at what he called an internal DDoS attack at his company. His teams are producing so much with AI now that it’s become impossible to assess whether each feature, pull request or change is worth shipping.
The “can we” versus “should we” argument is now on steroids
[Jeff Gothelf]
Quick Wins and Autonomous Backlog Coding
“This is a quick win! The customer says it’s trivial. Just adding a dropdown or a new data value or moving a button. Probably only 10 lines of code. Your team can knock this out in an hour.”
There are quick wins, even in Engineering and Product and Design. But the revenue side of the house doesn’t mean what we mean by “quick wins.”
The push to fully autonomous code creation is relentless
[Rich Mironov / Product Bytes]
recent posts
Chess is easier when you can see the board
A Wardley Map is to corporate strategy what a chessboard is to players: you can absolutely play the game in your head without seeing the board, but if you can it’s a lot easier to play, and you have a massive advantage over the people who can’t.
Know what moves you can make, and why to choose this move now
[I Manage Products]
How to form a go-to-market strategy
A go-to-market strategy isn’t something you tack on as an afterthought to an upcoming product launch. Instead it’s about understanding where value exchanges occur, and figuring out how to make them more frequent, consistent and predictable.
Go-to-market emerges from your discovery
[I Manage Products]
We’re all addicted to AI, but it’s going to be okay
We seem to stuck in a contradiction in which we worry about AI’s effect on our critical thinking, while finding it equally hard to resist using. Why is that?
[I Manage Products]
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PRODUCTHEAD is a newsletter for product people of all varieties, and is lovingly crafted from roller boots.