Recommended Reading

As a product manager, The Mole often needs to make decisions. Sometimes the evidence is unambiguous and the conclusion undebatable. Far more often, the evidence is dodgy and the risk of cognitive biases degrading the quality of the decision is very real. The literature on cognitive biases is rich -- The Mole heartily recommends hanging a copy of the Cognitive Bias Codex that Design Hacks created based on Buster Benson's cheat sheet where you cannot ignore it -- but there's a paucity of information about how to cope.

Not surprisingly, at least in retrospect, some people involved in big life-or-death decisions have worked to fill the gap. The Mole is referring to the folks who assess whether or not the preponderance of evidence points towards unleashing the power of America's armamentarium: the CIA's intelligence analysts. Richards J. Heuer crafted a system called "Analysis of Competing Hypotheses" that rotates one's thinking ninety degrees and drains out a lot of opportunity for bias. As with many things paid for with taxpayer dollars, it is available for free download from the CIA. There's also an inexpensive commercial print-on-demand version from Globalytica.

Product managers were not the intended audience, so The Mole suggests that when reading it you have a regex parser running continuously in your head, making substitutions like these:

• intelligence analyst --> product manager
• intelligence analysis --> product management
• analytical process --> product management process
• analytical products --> requirements documents
• intelligence consumers --> software engineers
• policymakers --> executives
• foreign leaders --> users
• foreign governments --> customers