It’s tempting to think great product managers are natural-born strategists — visionaries with an uncanny instinct for what users want. But most of the time, product sense isn’t about intuition at all. It’s about behaviour. And not just user behaviour — yours.
Under pressure, even the most experienced PMs fall prey to mental shortcuts. You push forward a pitch not because it’s strong, but because it’s yours. You keep a feature in scope because removing it feels like failure. You ignore warning signs because they contradict your original assumptions. None of this is malice. It’s just how humans work.
The Bias Beneath the Roadmap
Confirmation bias, overconfidence, sunk cost fallacy — these aren’t abstract psych terms. They’re live wires running through every product decision we make.
Confirmation bias shows up when a team searches for data that proves a feature works, not whether it should exist. Overconfidence creeps in during backlog grooming, when we throw in a 3-point estimate because “we’ve done similar work before” — conveniently ignoring context drift or tech debt. Sunk cost fallacy drives us to keep iterating on a half-dead feature because of the time we’ve already spent, even when we’d never greenlight it from scratch today.
These patterns shape everything from discovery framing to stakeholder comms. Left unchecked, they become invisible design constraints — not on the product, but on the team’s clarity.
Bounded Rationality and the Myth of the Rational PM
Let’s kill the myth of the all-seeing, decision-perfect PM. In practice, every call we make is a compromise — bounded by time, emotion, and what our brains can handle.
Bounded rationality is the idea that people make the best decisions they can, given their limits. We’re juggling Slack pings, sprint reviews, prioritisation docs, stakeholder feedback, and the occasional existential doubt. Of course our brains rely on shortcuts.
The trick isn’t to eliminate bias. It’s to recognise it, name it, and create systems that slow us down just enough to question ourselves. Decision pre-mortems, red team reviews, confidence scores — they don’t just improve choices. They build a culture of behavioural awareness.
Stories We Tell Ourselves
I once pushed a “quick win” UI tweak to a feature with minimal uptake. I framed it as a test. What I really wanted was a dopamine hit — to feel like I was doing something. The data said it wasn’t worth it. My gut said “this is easy — we’ll learn something.” What we actually learned was that my gut wanted to feel useful more than it wanted clarity.
A friend of mine — a deeply thoughtful PM — once torpedoed a valuable research thread because the initial findings conflicted with what she’d already told leadership. It wasn’t ego. It was fear of appearing indecisive.
These aren’t cautionary tales. They’re reminders: behavioural patterns aren’t flaws. They’re the starting point for better product thinking.
Conclusion: Behavioural Clarity > Product Genius
The best PMs I’ve worked with aren’t “idea people.” They’re decision navigators. They’re aware of their own triggers. They build lightweight processes to test assumptions. They invite dissent. They prioritise clarity over comfort.
In a world obsessed with frameworks, tools, and trends, behavioural clarity remains underrated. But if we want better products — and better teams — we need to debug ourselves as often as we debug our roadmaps.