Mastering Prioritization: Avoiding Availability Bias
Every software product manager in their career felt the burden of product prioritization, where every decision carries weighty consequences. They often find themselves inundated with vast information, opinions, and experiences, yet they must quickly recognize beliefs from facts and make critical decisions. And it becomes absolutely crucial they recognize the cognitive traps that can cloud their judgment.
One such cognitive bias that frequently lurks in the background is availability bias. This phenomenon can subtly distort the product manager’s decision-making process, especially when discussing product priorities with various customer-facing roles.
Understanding and mitigating the influence of availability bias is paramount in ensuring that your decisions are grounded in a comprehensive and unbiased assessment of all the product priorities.
What exactly is availability bias?
Throughout the course of evolution, our brains have developed various efficient systems for processing information and making quick judgments to ensure our survival. Availability bias is one such shortcut system.
Because of it, humans tend to rely heavily on information that readily comes to mind when we make decisions. Our brains naturally perceive information that is easily remembered or stands out more as beingimportant or likely to happen, even if that may not be the case. We give easily accessible information or experiences more weight in our decision-making process, even if they might not be representative or accurate.
In product management, this bias can become problematic when it leads us to prioritize readily available but potentially incomplete or misleading information over a more comprehensive and accurate understanding of the situation. To give you an example — every product manager will sooner or later hear a question that goes along the lines: “This is the 3rd time I had a customer mention this functionality to me this month, as this is clearly critical when we will put it on the roadmap?”
However, the fact that a feature request was mentioned three times within the last month can be insignificant compared to other product opportunities or feature requests. There might be requests from more important customers or planned projects of strategic importance (e.g., building new product differentiation).
The danger lies in the risks associated with this cognitive trap, as falling for it can lead to long-lasting product consequences.
Risks of availability bias
First, this cognitive shortcut can result in a biased sample of user data and their problems. When you rely on the most recent user interactions, you may overlook the needs of other users with more critical requirements. This can skew your understanding of your target audience’s needs and prevent you from fully understanding their challenges. Remember that the most vocal customers are not necessarily the best representation of your ideal client profile.
Secondly, by relying on easily accessible data and information, you’re willingly limiting your domain perspective, risking missing out on valuable insights and overlooking potential opportunities for innovation. It is vital for product managers to actively work on broadening their understanding of the problem space with continuous product discovery and synthesize additional context from sales & expansion data, competition analysis, or market trends. To make a well-informed decision during prioritization, you must have as much complete information about your product situation as possible.
Moreover, neglecting continuous product discovery and relying just on recent customer feedback can lead to the wrong design decisions. Users may only sometimes know or accurately articulate their underlying needs, and relying solely on their input can result in a design that addresses only surface-level issues.
The final risk arises when it comes to achieving strategic goals. Availability bias, by its very nature, favors immediate and easily recalled information — most of the time — very recent information, which can shift your focus away from achieving long-term strategic objectives. This short-term orientation can have detrimental effects on the product roadmap, strategy, and overall customer satisfaction, as it overlooks the broader vision and long-term development of the product.
Can it be prevented?
When it comes to battling availability bias, awareness is vital. Simply understanding this bias and its impact on your decision-making can go a long way in combating its influence. Acknowledging its presence (or its effect on your past work), you can actively challenge given assumptions and strive for a more balanced perspective when assessing the next product opportunities or issues.
One of the easiest ways to build this perspective is by centralizing your product data and feedback. By bringing together all relevant information in one place, you create a holistic view of your customers’ problems and needs, which broadens your perspective when evaluating product ideas and feature requests. Centralizing the data will also provide evidence for prioritization discussions or de-escalation of customer issues. It will help you focus your efforts on things that matter the most.
However, you must regularly share this knowledge with your stakeholders and colleagues outside the product department. As a product manager, you will always have a much better understanding of the broader customer context, and you must explain why you’ve decided to focus product efforts a certain way. This regular communication is absolutely vital for long-term alignment. Moreover, it can trigger discussions revealing additional context or reveal missing information streams (e.g., missing sales data in win-loss analysis).
Most importantly, ensuring that your decision-making aligns with the long-term product vision and business strategy is crucial. The hard-to-swallow truth is that you will never have enough development capacity to simultaneously address every customer need, feature request and execute your ideal product plan. Inevitably, tough prioritization discussions and decisions will arise where different stakeholders will try to steer the priorities in different directions. Your product vision and strategy become your most valuable assets in such challenging moments, and you, as a product manager, must ensure all the product priorities are aligned with them.
The necessary step toward the focus
Availability bias can quickly become a product manager’s biggest enemy leading you to skewed priorities, missed opportunities, and compromised long-term strategic goals. However, it is a fight you must take as a product manager to step up your game and work on things that move the needle the most.
Additionally, the more you can overcome it, the more you’ll notice that you’re focused, can easily prioritize, and shorten everyday discussions.
In today’s constantly changing markets, the focus is king. And that alone makes it, in my eyes, a fight worth fighting.
So my fellow product managers, let me ask you again:
How really urgent is the last customer request that you heard? Isn’t there anything else you should be focusing on?
