107: Overcoming Biases Using Adversarial Product Management, with Chris Butler

How “Adversarial Product Management” helps us overcome biases

Our cognitive – and other – biases can lead to bad decisions and poor product designs.

You see the results in products that are hard to use, or that simply fail to make a dent in the market.

But there are ways to overcome and manage these cognitive biases. And in this episode my friend Chris Butler gives us some great advice on “adversarial product management” to do just that.

Chris has a fantastic presentation on YouTube, called Adversarial Product Management, and as soon as I saw it I wanted to get him on the podcast to share his ideas.

The term “adversarial” comes from Nobel-prize winning behavioral scientist Daniel Kahneman, who expands on it in this EDGE talk, about the need to test our ideas against bias.

We have these cognitive biases, and the worst of them is the one that tells us we don’t have cognitive biases. I’m not talking about the Dunning-Kruger effect, but something more insidious. It’s called the “blindspot bias” and it just means we cannot detect when our own biases are affecting our thinking.

Links

Adversarial Product Management talk at NYC Mind the Product Meetup

Better Decision Making Through Randomness talk with the Behavioral Economics Meetup

Try Triggers Human-Centric deck

Oblique Strategies deck – free online alternative 

Provocative Prototyping: how making annoying things can help you design better | by Anna Haverinen | UX Collective

Honing Crazy Eights with randomness | by Chris Butler | UX Collective

Product Manager Critiques: How to Raise the Bar of Your Product People | by Chris Butler | Agile Insider | Medium

And the special deal on Calido I mentioned is at https://appsumo.com/products/calido/.

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How “Adversarial Product Management” helps us overcome biases

Our cognitive – and other – biases can lead to bad decisions and poor product designs.

You see the results in products that are hard to use,