A Guide to Sharpening Your Product Intuition: Fixing the Blind Spots
Every feature prioritization, roadmap decision, and user story you craft is subtly shaped by unseen cognitive biases. Here's the playbook smart PMs rely on to consistently ship the right products
Most product leaders like to think they’re rational—I certainly did, right up until a $50M decision almost derailed our product launch. That experience opened my eyes to the invisible forces potentially hijacking our decision-making process. It also taught me how the world’s top executives are transforming these cognitive blind spots into their competitive edge.
While leading the development of some of our most successful products, I witnessed firsthand how unconscious biases can derail even the most promising product strategy. But here’s the fascinating part: the most successful leaders I know don’t try to eliminate these biases—they weaponize them.
Let me share what sets exceptional leaders apart. It begins with understanding the three most dangerous biases that are likely sabotaging your decisions right now:
The Confirmation Trap: Your Brain's Favorite Lie
Remember that product feature you were convinced would revolutionize the market? The one your gut told you was perfect, despite what the data suggested? That is confirmation bias in action. Your brain filters out information that doesn't match your beliefs, creating an echo chamber that can (and will most likely) cost millions.
The Binary Blindfold: How Oversimplification Kills Innovation
In today's complex market, seeing things in black and white is not just wrong – it is dangerous. Time and again, I’ve seen brilliant leaders oversimplify intricate problems into either/or decisions, overlooking the golden opportunities hidden in the grey areas between obvious choices.
The ability to navigate both sides of the divide has become an essential, critical skill.
The Social Survival Instinct: Why Your Team Isn't Telling You the Truth
Here's a shocking reality: your team is probably lying to you right now. Not because they are dishonest, but because their brains are wired to tell you what you want to hear. This "social desirability bias" is silently killing your innovation potential.
Outsmarting Your “Product” Brain
Here's where it gets interesting: top leaders aren't victims of these biases – they are masters of them. Let me show you the five battle-tested techniques that have successfully transformed my decision-making process:
The “Pretend You Don't Work Here” Trick.
The “What If Everything Goes Wrong?’’ Game.
The ‘‘More Than Yes/No’’ Method.
The ‘‘Time Machine’’ Exercise.
The ‘‘Product Brain’’ Trust.
These techniques aren't just theoretical – they are proven tools that have generated billions in revenue for companies I have worked with. I call it the practical guide to outsmarting your “product” brain.
You have your data (both quantitative and anecdotal), your processes, and your frameworks, yet sometimes things still go sideways- customers are not using the product, the product isn't making revenue, PMF is slow or not on the horizon. I have been there too. I’ll break this guide down and connect these tips with some real-world lessons that have saved my product decisions time and time again.
The “Pretend You Don't Work Here” Trick
You know how you can't tickle yourself because your brain is too familiar with your touch? Product management is the same way.
Here's a story that still makes me cringe. We were building what we believed was a game-changing messaging platform. The team used it daily, the metrics looked solid, and customer complaints were minimal—classic “everything is fine” territory.
Then, one Friday afternoon, I tried something different. I pretended I was a PM from Slack (you know, the folks who live and breathe messaging) doing a competitive analysis of our product. I grabbed a fresh notebook, cleared my calendar for an hour, and forced myself to see our product with new eyes.
Within 15 minutes, I felt my stomach drop.
Our settings menu, which we had proudly been adding features to for months, had turned into a nightmare. What started as three simple toggle options had morphed into a five-level maze. Want to change your notification sound? That’ll take four clicks, two drop downs, and a scroll through a settings category we’d labeled “Advanced Preferences” (which really meant, “we had no idea where else to put this”). The worst part was that we had been congratulating ourselves on our “power user features.” In reality, we have been slowly building a product that made perfect sense to us and zero sense to everyone else.
What struck me most was this: despite offering far more functionality, Slack’s settings took just two clicks to reach any option. Ours? Seven. We had fallen into the classic PM trap—mistaking feature bloat for feature richness.
The fix wasn't pretty; we had to:
Redraw our entire settings architecture.
Kill several “but power users might need this” options.
Admit we'd been solving for ourselves, not our users.
Rebuild the whole thing from scratch.
But here is the silver lining: A month after launching the simplified version, our user engagement with settings increased by 37%. It turns out that when you make something easier to use, people actually use it.
The lesson here is this - your familiarity with your product isn't just a blind spot – it is a blindfold. You need to deliberately step outside your product bubble to see what's going on.
As part of the culture, I introduced a session every first Friday of the month, where someone on our team does the “competitor PM” exercise. We caught countless issues early, from confusing onboarding flows to overcomplicated search filters. It became our secret weapon for staying customer-focused.
Sometimes the best product insights come from pretending you don't know your product at all.
The Pre-Mortem - What If Everything Goes Wrong?
Picture this: We were six weeks away from launching our biggest feature of the year - an AI-powered chat system for customer support. The team was pumped. Early tests and hypothesis validation looked great. Even our CEO was bragging about it to investors. Then I tried something that changed everything.
I gathered the team in our war room and said: “It's six months from launch. Our chat system has completely failed. It's a disaster. What happened?”
At first, there was nervous laughter. Then our junior developer who's usually the most quiet in the room, raised her hand to say: “What if users started creating fake support tickets? Like, hundreds of them, overwhelming our training models?”
The room went silent. In our excitement about the AI Agent’s capability to handle multiple tickets, we had completely overlooked spam prevention. One bad actor could have brought down our entire support system.
This wasn't just a small oversight. Our entire architecture needed rethinking. We had to:
Build a robust verification system.
Create rate-limiting controls.
Develop an abuse detection algorithm.
Design a manual override process.
It delayed our launch by three weeks and the sales team was not happy. However, two months post-launch, a competitor's similar feature got hammered by spam bots. They had to shut it down for two days. Our system? Didn't even flinch.
Subsequently, we ran pre-mortems for every major feature, which eventually helped us catch a potential data privacy issue before it went to production. Addicted to this, we also ran one for our new analytics dashboard. Sometimes, imagining failure is the best way to ensure success.
The “More Than Yes/No” Method
“We need to rebuild the entire onboarding flow.”
I still remember our Head of Growth purposefully striding towards my desk with this declaration. Our activation rates were down 23% and the executive team wanted answers.
The obvious response was to say yes. After all, our onboarding was six months old-which is ancient in startup time- and our competitors had glossier and shinier flows. Our designers already had sleek mockups ready.
But instead of jumping to a decision, I pulled out what my team eventually dubbed the “Choice Map.” I gathered leads from product, engineering, design, business, and analytics teams in a room. On the whiteboard, I drew five columns:
I turned to the team and said, “Before we rebuild anything, let's take an hour to dive into each column.” What happened next forever changed the way we made decisions.
Under “Remove Something,” our analytics lead pointed out that 60% of our churned users never made it past our mandatory tutorial. “What if we just... didn't force people to take it?” The designer who had been pushing for a rebuild sat back in his chair- “wait, are we solving the wrong problem?” We dug deeper. It turned out that users who skipped the tutorial and jumped straight into the product had a 58% higher activation rate than those who completed it. Our carefully crafted onboarding was killing our metrics.
Instead of spending three months and $250K on a rebuild, we:
Made the tutorial optional.
Simplified the first-time user screen.
Removed three "helpful" tooltips.
Added a small "show me around" button.
The result? Activation jumped 45% in two weeks. Cost of changes? Two days of development time.
But here’s the real kicker: At our next all-hands, when we shared these results, the Growth Lead who had originally pushed for the rebuild said something I’ll never forget: “Sometimes the best feature is removing one.”
The team eventually used the Choice Map for every significant product decision. I recall one instance the following month when it helped us realize that improving our existing search algorithm would deliver more value than building the fancy AI-powered one everyone wanted.
Because the best solution isn't always building something new - sometimes it's questioning why something exists in the first place.
The Time Machine Exercise- Why Your Product Roadmap Is Too Simple
“Digital detox” was not even a term when we started building our meditation app. We were crushing it - 4.8 stars in the App Store, 200K monthly active users, and a waitlist of brands wanting to partner with us. Our roadmap was packed with exciting features: better animations, personalized recommendations, and social sharing.
A classic success story, right?
Then during a random team retro, our designer asked a question that would haunt me: “What if our entire assumption about phones and meditation is wrong?” That question hit me hard enough to try something different.
I booked our biggest meeting room for a full day. On three massive whiteboards, I wrote:
“Today," I told the team, “we are time travelers.”
Under Probable Future, we listed the obvious: more competitors, better phone cameras, and improved audio quality. Standard stuff.
Next, we tackled the Dream Scenario: AR meditation spaces, bio-feedback integration, personalized AI guides—the energy was electric.
But the real gold came from Nightmare Case. Our ML engineer mentioned Apple might release meditation features in the Health Kit. Our designer pointed out that TikTok could make meditation “snackable” and kill our longer-format approach.
Then that same designer who sparked this whole exercise dropped another bomb: “What if phones themselves become the problem? What if the next wellness trend is a digital detox?”
The room went quiet. We had been so focused on building the best phone app, that we missed a bigger shift: our customers might want to meditate WITHOUT their phones.
This insight led to a radical pivot. Instead of just building a better app, we:
Created an Apple Watch version (phone-free experience).
Developed offline mode with downloadable sessions.
Built Alexa and Google Home integrations.
Started exploring e-ink devices.
Six months later, Apple did announce wellness features. Several meditation apps saw their downloads plummet. But our numbers grew. Why? Because we were not just an app anymore - we were a phone-optional wellness platform.
The best part was that when the digital detox trend hit (just as our designer predicted), we were ready. While competitors scrambled, we launched our “Digital Sunset” feature, which eventually helped users spend less time on their phones.
We went on to run Time Machine exercises quarterly. When I think about the work of product management, being right about the future is less about luck – it is about imagining multiple futures and being ready for all of them.
The Product Brain Trust- Why Your Inner Circle Is Killing Your Product
I watched in silence as our most anticipated feature launch of the year fell flat. Not the catastrophic kind of flat - worse. The kind where customers simply... don't care.
What hurt most wasn’t the wasted effort—it was realizing that everyone in our daily standups, planning sessions, and review meetings loved it. We had created the perfect echo chamber.
That's when I decided to build what I now call a Product Brain Trust.
But this is not your typical “advisory board” story. I deliberately sought out four people who would make me uncomfortable (not their real names):
Sarah, a gaming product leader thought our B2B software was “terribly boring.” Her first question in every review was: “Why would anyone actually want this?”
Marcus, a UX designer turned founder who scaled his startup to acquisition. He had a knack for spotting when we were building for ourselves instead of our users. “Your power users are lying to you,” became his catchphrase.
Elena, a GTM leader who had seen three IPOs, could smell a weak value proposition from miles away. She once told me our pricing strategy “made about as much sense as selling water to fish.”
And then there was Tom, a tech lead from a completely different industry—urban farming, of all things—who asked the “stupid” questions that turned out to be brilliant. His question, “Why do B2B tools have to look like they were designed in 1995?” sparked our biggest UX breakthrough.
We met every six weeks. No presentations were allowed- just honest, sometimes brutal conversations about our product decisions.
The first meeting was rough. According to Sarah, our “innovative” new dashboard was “solving a problem no one had.” Then Marcus took one look at our “streamlined” workflow and said, “You’ve just hidden the complexity, not removed it.” And the premium feature we were betting on? Elena just laughed at it.
But six months in, something shifted. We started anticipating their questions during our regular product discussions. “What would Sarah say about this?” became a common question in product reviews. “Marcus would hate how we are overcomplicating this” saved us from several over-engineered solutions.
The results?
Feature adoption went up by 64%.
Sales cycle shortened by 40%.
Churn reduced by half.
NPS jumped 28 points.
The real win was that we stopped shipping things customers didn't want. Our hit rate on features went from about 40% to over 72%. If at any point we could not convince this skeptical crew, we’d go back to the drawing board.
Your team's excitement about a feature is often your biggest red flag. Sometimes the best product insights come from people who aren't afraid to tell you your baby is ugly.
I still remember Tom's words from our last meeting: “You know you have built something good when even the skeptics can't find something to hate.”
Bottom line
The truth about product management that nobody tells you: Your biggest enemy is not your competition, your technical debt, or even your deadlines. It is your brain.
Every day, we make dozens of product decisions, believing we are being logical, data-driven, and customer-focused. But beneath that careful analysis, our cognitive biases are quietly steering the ship.
The best PMs I know are not the ones with perfect product sense. They are the ones who have learned to doubt their certainty. They play “What If Everything Goes Wrong?” before it does. They step outside their products to see them with fresh eyes. They reject simple yes/no choices for richer solutions. They imagine multiple futures instead of betting on one. And they surround themselves with people who aren't afraid to tell them they're wrong.
Because at the end of the day, great products aren't built on confidence. They're built on constructive doubt.
What assumptions about your product should you be questioning today?
If these stories resonate with you, you are going to love what's coming next. In a few weeks, I will be sharing an in-depth, behind-the-scenes look at how successful product teams build their roadmaps - the messy truth no one talks about. You will get real examples, hard-learned lessons, and practical frameworks you can use immediately.
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