How To Apply Behavioral Science to Product Management

A great product manager uses the principles of behavioral economics and design to understand their users and to build products that actually address customer needs.

A great product manager understands their users really really well. They understand the interplay between how their users think, feel, and behave — while using their product and beyond. They are the strongest advocate for the customer in the room, able to channel the voice of the customer throughout the product development and design process.

The KEY steps of the product development lifecycle are at the beginning: defining and prioritizing the problem you want to solve. A PM’s job is to figure out what is the problem that’s worth solving.

Here’s where many people fall into one of two traps.

We are so excited about and confident in the product/service we have in mind that we jump multiple steps ahead and assume we know what the right solution is for our potential users. Trap #1: We think we know what the customer wants. And so we start building and designing the product that we think our customers will salivate for and jump at. (Spoiler alert: this will almost never happen.)

Maybe we don’t exactly know what our customers want or we decide we want to double-check our assumptions and do some user research to better understand our target customer segment. We do some interviews, send out some surveys. We listen intently as people tell us what kind of solution they want and what features they’re craving, their hopes and dreams. Trap #2: We build what our potential customers tell us they want.

As smart as humans are, we are handicapped by dozens of cognitive biases that affect our decision-making and behavior. We think we know what we want and need but we are very often very wrong. How we behave does not align with what we think and say. We are not rational. The reality is, people most often aren’t aware why they make the decisions that they do. And, the research shows that we are overconfident in our ability to speak to why we behave the way we do.

We are heavily biased towards present rewards and outcomes, we tend to stick with default options and default behaviors (ingrained habits), and we are risk & loss-averse. We are not consciously aware of the impact that powerful forces such as social norms, emotion, and identity can have on our behavior. Even those of us who’ve studied behavioral science are susceptible to these biases and the cues — hidden or overt — that our contextual environments provide. On top of this, we’re all busy and distracted — cognitive overload is a thing!

So, if we can’t determine the problem we want to solve by going with our own gut or asking people what they want, then how do we figure out what to build?!

So to figure out what our users need we just ask them, right? Instead of asking them what they want? WRONG! The best way to determine what people need is by observing them in their actual environment. Diagnose the problems they’re experiencing by witnessing them first-hand. This approach focuses your attention on understanding the current state of your potential user’s world. Investigate the decision-making points along a person’s behavioral journey:

If you can answer these questions, then you’ll be in a much better place to define the key problem you want to solve as a PM and start designing an MVP solution. Once you’ve observed multiple different potential users (it only takes 5–10 people), you’ll start to notice trends.

This approach requires more thoughtfulness and a natural curiosity to figuring out what’s worth spending your time on as a team. And once you have a prototype, you can take the same approach to collecting feedback: observe how people react to and interact with your product. If your solution is truly innovative, people may find themselves falling in love with a product or service that they didn’t even know they needed or would ever think of using! Think AirBnB (vs hotels), cars (vs horse-drawn carriages), and virtual medical appointments (vs in-person appointments).

One of the most useful tools for understanding customer motivation is the Jobs-To-Be-Done framework. In short, JTBD explains that humans make decisions to behave in a certain way because they are trying to:

Think about what motivates you when you brush your teeth in the morning, or read the headlines, or scroll a dating app, or write an email, or order a salad for lunch instead of a sandwich. Think about any action you take during the day — why did you do it?

You probably have an answer that sounds like, “I wanted my breath to smell fresh” “I wanted to communicate an important message to a colleague” “I wanted to feel healthy” “I wanted an update on the run-up to the election.”

The common thread here is that we make decisions to behave in a certain way in order to make progress.

In product/service development, this approach is useful because it puts us in a mindset to understand a person’s motivation for signing-up for/buying/using/disengaging from/sharing our product or service.

(Even in cases where we perform behaviors out of habit and might not immediately have an answer to the “why” question, actually, you’re performing that behavior because it’s easy — you’ve done it so many times before that it’s become a default, automatic choice that you don’t even actively think about. The outcome and feeling you’re going for in these situations is simplicity, reduced friction, and certainty.)

So, the next time you interview or observe a customer, look for the intentionality and motivation behind their actions. What are they trying to achieve? What emotions are present? Look for high points and low points, success and struggle. What is happening when they engage and what is happening when they disengage?

As a PM, you have great power and great responsibility to deliver a product that serves your user’s needs. The easy way out is building the grand idea that you think your customers will love or asking them what they want and delivering it on a silver platter. But this approach will mislead you and waste a lot of time. You will be well-intentioned, I’m sure, but you’ll also be wrong. The best approach is to focus on understanding people’s behavior by studying what they actually do. Do this early on and throughout your development & design process. And get your whole team to start thinking in this way.

Related posts:

You are a professional robber planning to rob houses along a street. Each house has a certain amount of money stashed, the only constraint stopping you from robbing each of them is that adjacent…