(2018-08-22) 20 Mental Models For Product Managers

Karen A: 20 Mental Models for Product Managers

Stage 1: Conceive

Mental Models

Representativeness Heuristic — Tendency to Stereotype

Being aware of this, PMs can guard against this bias by consciously working to uncover areas where more digging needs to be done to find the root cause(s) of user needs.

Second Order Thinking

multiple layers of effects

avoid unintended side effects

Tendency to Overgeneralize from Small Samples

Stage 2: Plan

customer development

Mental Models

Comparative advantage

Bottlenecks

Narrative Instinct

The ability to construct a story around your product that appeals to users could be the key differentiator between your offering and a competitor’s

Trust

find avenues to establish trust very quickly when speaking to users

Commitment & Consistency bias

When speaking to potential users, a good way to secure commitments and overcome barriers to adoption is by breaking down large promises to smaller chunks of commitment, which they can consistently adopt in a stepwise process.

Stage 3: Develop

Mental Models

Opportunity cost

Utility (marginal, increasing, diminishing)

Stage 4: Iterate/Launch/Steady State

focusing on growing through a combination of several approaches — user retention, optimization, testing, and scaling

Mental Models

Fragility — Robustness — Antifragility

PMs can use this model to determine what needs to be built to take their product further down the spectrum towards achieving antifragility, such as safety, performance features and ability to cover a maximum number of edge cases.

Feedback Loops

Stage 5: Maintain or Kill

Pareto principle

Mental Models

Law of diminishing returns

Scale

Working with People

Mental Models

Circle of competence

Seeing the front

observing what’s in front of oneself before making decisions, rather than relying solely on advice, research, and reports

Social Proof (Safety in numbers)