I worked with a research manager at Microsoft, a place known for hiring over confident product managers who skillfully weave opinion into seemingly factual arguments, who liked this well placed dumb question,
“What makes you so sure?”
Often times when he knew he had at least some empirical evidence that usually dampened their hubris…and enthusiasm. 😏
This is awesome @Kasey. Ironically, I wrote something along similar lines this week. I touched on the network effect and zero-knowlege proofs - a web3 / blockchain solution that's gaining steam. More here if you're interested - https://mirror.xyz/oriongrowth.eth/1GXMYA-Gbgm-S_U8Du41zZ4DoZ9XeTqXlAhegHzN9wk Thx for sharing Epistemic Hygiene.
Great piece. I see this crop up often in teams across product, marketing, sales, and others, pretty universally. I hear often singular instances made plural — "customers are asking for", but when probed, really it's one customer asking about a thing we *project* will be of interest to others, too. It's the hidden projection piece we need to expose to differentiate from the facts on the ground. The corporate game of telephone starts to twist the details of anything once it leaves the source, so we at least need the origin to be grounded in reality.
I don't think as part of product teams we *need* to have hard facts guiding every decision — it's impossible. But we should have intellectual honesty about claims vs. hiding the ball (or not having the rigor to even understand the claim).
I worked with a research manager at Microsoft, a place known for hiring over confident product managers who skillfully weave opinion into seemingly factual arguments, who liked this well placed dumb question,
“What makes you so sure?”
Often times when he knew he had at least some empirical evidence that usually dampened their hubris…and enthusiasm. 😏
This is awesome @Kasey. Ironically, I wrote something along similar lines this week. I touched on the network effect and zero-knowlege proofs - a web3 / blockchain solution that's gaining steam. More here if you're interested - https://mirror.xyz/oriongrowth.eth/1GXMYA-Gbgm-S_U8Du41zZ4DoZ9XeTqXlAhegHzN9wk Thx for sharing Epistemic Hygiene.
Great piece. I see this crop up often in teams across product, marketing, sales, and others, pretty universally. I hear often singular instances made plural — "customers are asking for", but when probed, really it's one customer asking about a thing we *project* will be of interest to others, too. It's the hidden projection piece we need to expose to differentiate from the facts on the ground. The corporate game of telephone starts to twist the details of anything once it leaves the source, so we at least need the origin to be grounded in reality.
I don't think as part of product teams we *need* to have hard facts guiding every decision — it's impossible. But we should have intellectual honesty about claims vs. hiding the ball (or not having the rigor to even understand the claim).