The Fundamental Cognitive Bias of Product Builders
The fundamental cognitive bias of product builders has 4 embedded beliefs together:
“My product is great, but it isn’t successful because I have a marketing & distribution problem”
“My competitor’s product is successful mainly because of their marketing & distribution”
“My product is better than my competitor’s”
“To succeed, I must just keep making my product better”
Nearly every passionate product builder has this compound bias.
Some spot it eventually, others go through their entire career without ever spotting it.
A prerequisite to go from being a competent product builder to being an elite product builder is to:
- see this bias in yourself [0]
- understand how each individual statement is greatly flawed [1]
- spot the basic logic error across these statements [2]
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[0] In practice, this is very hard for passionate mid-career product builders because it requires us to admit how much we still need to learn about making successful products.
[1] Usually this understanding only comes with hard-won experience. But not everyone with experience reaches this understanding.
[2] Check out this Claude chat for a comprehensive understanding of the logic error and the epistemic errors underlying this bias. It is a short read (~5 minutes), and for some product builders at the right phase in their career, it will be life changing.
This feels self-sealing in a way most product teams miss. If growth is weak, it is easy to blame distribution. If the product feels strong internally, it is easy to assume the market will catch up. AI probably makes the reflex worse because it lowers the cost of adding more product instead of forcing the harder question about positioning and demand. Have you found a good way to surface this bias early?
Great post and Claude chat, Shreyas. Thanks for sharing.
I feel that one of the reasons (amongst many) this goes undetected is these 4 biases don’t typically get surfaced at the same time, but when you juxtapose them the logical error becomes more self-evident. They are contextually deployed defense mechanisms, essentially.