Perhaps You Are Not The Best Person To Evaluate Your Product
While I found the concept of loss aversion, or that humans tend to overestimate the losses associated with changing a behavior relatively intuitive, I thought one of the more nuanced, and most eye-opening, aspects of this article was the mention of the extent to which developers overvalue their innovations. As a function of being so close to the problem, innovators lose sense of how much the average person actually cares about the features they are developing. This, in turn, makes them unable to accurately evaluate the losses and gains, or ultimate value, associated with a product and how willing consumers are to adopt the product. However, putting myself in the shoes of someone who is creating a product, I can imagine it feels intuitive to think that you, as the expert, are in the best position to accurately evaluate the product’s ultimate value. However, this research would suggest that it is perhaps more effective to have someone from a different team, who is further away from the problem, evaluate the losses and gains of a product in order to more accurately determine the amount of behavior change required for adoption.
Okay, but how do we do that?
While this conclusion in itself is perhaps not the most surprising information, I think the practical implications for overcoming this bias can inform how we create successful product evaluations. The obvious first step to evaluating the product is to conduct customer interviews. While I think that this is a good first step, I would caution against product teams thinking that conducting interviews alone is enough, as I could imagine that someone on the innovating team might experience confirmation bias and interpret the information from the customer interviews in a way that supports their beliefs about the value of the product. Thus, I would suggest that companies create external review processes, that allow a member of an unrelated team or perhaps even another customer, to review the information gathered during customer interviews and note their own conclusions from the interview. In the case of very small startups, where perhaps they do not have the resources to do this, they could also use generative AI to conduct these types of unbiased evaluations. Whatever method they choose, by reviewing this information from a less biased perspective, product teams might be able to get a better understanding of the true value of their product and more accurately situate it in the two-by-two matrix of product change and behavior change described in the reading.
Beyond This, External Reviews Might Help Teams Avoid Feature Creep
By allowing product teams to more accurately evaluate their products, I think that systematically implementing external review processes allows teams to avoid feature creep. While it is natural that innovators, who want to solve the problem to the fullest extent, might add additional features that ultimately make the product too foreign for the customer to adopt, by having more unbiased evaluations, product teams will have a better sense of what the customer actually wants and the extent to which they care about each aspect of the product being developed. While easier said than done, this strategy will help to keep the user at the center of the design process, allowing teams to avoid adding features that increase the barrier to adoption without significantly increasing the gains associated with its use.
