How can Product Marketing professionals avoid cognitive biases and improve problem solving?
As a product marketing professional, you need to solve complex problems and make strategic decisions on a daily basis. However, your thinking process may be influenced by cognitive biases, which are mental shortcuts or distortions that affect how you perceive and interpret information. Cognitive biases can lead to errors, misjudgments, and missed opportunities in product marketing. How can you avoid them and improve your problem solving skills? Here are some tips to help you out.
Some of the most common cognitive biases that can affect product marketing are confirmation bias, anchoring bias, availability bias, and framing effect. Confirmation bias is the tendency to seek and favor information that confirms your existing beliefs or hypotheses. Anchoring bias is the tendency to rely too much on the first piece of information you receive, and adjust your subsequent judgments based on it. Availability bias is the tendency to judge the likelihood or frequency of an event based on how easily you can recall examples of it. Framing effect is the tendency to be influenced by the way a question or a problem is presented, rather than by its objective facts. These biases can make you overlook important data, overestimate or underestimate your market potential, and fall for misleading or irrelevant cues.
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Addressing cognitive biases is mission-critical for effective product marketing. I'll also add that you have to start somewhere. You're not going to get it perfect the first time. Here are some tactical insights to give you a headstart: Awareness Workshops: Conduct workshops to educate on common cognitive biases, fostering a culture of awareness. Diverse Teams: Formulate teams with diverse perspectives to challenge inherent biases, promoting a rounded approach to problem-solving. Structured Decision-Making Frameworks: Utilize frameworks like Six Thinking Hats or SWOT analysis to structure decision-making, reducing biases' influence. These tactics might seem basic, but they're rarely implemented. Let's change that.
To avoid cognitive biases, you need to challenge your assumptions and test your hypotheses with evidence and logic. Don't rely on your intuition or gut feeling alone, but seek out multiple sources of information and perspectives. Use data and analytics to validate your assumptions and measure your results. Be aware of your own limitations and blind spots, and seek feedback from others who have different backgrounds, experiences, and opinions. Be open to changing your mind when you encounter new or contradictory information, and admit when you are wrong.
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I like to lean into the framework of "strong opinions loosely held". This means have an opinion about the project you're working on, but be open to having your assumptions challenged and mind changed. It is especially important for a product marketer to develop their own opinion given their knowledge of a given market, but that doesn't mean your solution is always right. Also important, create opportunities for your assumptions to be challenged. Don't just rely on people to give their feedback unsolicited.
Another way to avoid cognitive biases and improve your problem solving skills is to use frameworks and tools that can help you structure your thinking and guide your actions. Frameworks are systematic approaches or models that can help you define, analyze, and solve problems. Some examples of frameworks that can be useful for product marketing are SWOT analysis, value proposition canvas, customer journey map, and OKR (objectives and key results). Tools are specific techniques or methods that can help you generate ideas, evaluate options, and make decisions. Some examples of tools that can be useful for product marketing are brainstorming, mind mapping, prioritization matrix, and A/B testing.
Finally, you can avoid cognitive biases and improve your problem solving skills by learning from others who have faced similar or different problems and solved them successfully. You can learn from your peers, mentors, experts, customers, competitors, or other industries. You can learn from their successes and failures, their best practices and lessons learned, their insights and tips, and their feedback and suggestions. You can also learn from your own past experiences, by reflecting on what worked and what didn't, and what you can do better next time.
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Use data from unbiased sources like spyfu or SEMRush. Additionally, using AI tools like Bard is a great research platform that gives unbiased results for market and customer insights. The key is to know what questions to ask and what data is telling. Get, outside help to drill down on the deep data you need to make unbiased decisions.
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I think we're forgetting something here: Customer validation. I've learned the hard way that bias kicks in the moment you leave customers out. So: 1 - get customers involved when you start 2 - get customers involved alongside the process 3 - get customers involved at the end Get their reaction. Give them the honor to tear your work apart Let them answer - but always keep asking deeper questions. Their first answer is always polite. Ask them what's missing Ask them what they believe is BS Ask them how they'd say it differently And - don't take it personal.
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