Part 1

Did you know that the human brain makes around 35 000 decisions every single day? Most of them are unconscious and automatic, and we don’t even know about them. The only way the human brain can process this crazy overload is by using many shortcuts, simplifications, and rules of thumb. However, it often leads to various cognitive biases.

Understanding these biases can help you both design a better experience and improve your conversion rates. In this two-part article, I’m going to walk you through the ten most common biases and will demonstrate how you can utilize them.

Remember, there is…

Have you ever spent an excessive amount of time deciding which of the 30 different, nice-looking chocolate bars you want to buy? If your answer is yes, you’ve been a victim of the so-called Hick-Hyman’s law. In 1951, these two gentlemen — William Edmund Hick and Ray Hyman — discovered an interesting fact: “The time it takes to make a decision increases proportionally to the number and complexity of choices.” [1][2]

In other words, it will cost you much more time and energy to reach a decision when you have to choose from 20 options (e.g. in-store products, items in…

During the COVID-19 lockdown, our team discovered that we can easily work remotely. Soon, I came up with an idea of how to use this situation to my advantage — I decided to move my home-office to Lisbon for summer and then to Fuerteventura for autumn.

To exchange the lockdown and cold weather of Prague for a “beach office” was probably my best idea during this pandemic. My daily routines have changed and I’ve gained a different perspective. My new situation has boosted my mood and creativity and, best of all, I could also work on my surfing skills.

For…

Let’s face it — 99% of product ideas that compete for a place in your backlog are more or less rubbish. As product managers, we often have to find the 1% of good ideas and then choose only the best of them because of limited resources. This means saying “no” a lot...

In the past few years, I’ve realized that many arguments for building features are fundamentally wrong. They come with argumentation fallacies, and they can seriously damage the product and affect the decision making of an organization and its flexibility for years. Here are the worst arguments I’ve heard.

“But our competitors have it, too.”

…

Some time ago, I saw this beautiful inspirational image on Twitter that told inexperienced entrepreneurs and product managers how they should approach the development of their products. It had hundreds of retweets and likes yet there is something fundamentally wrong with it. To be honest with you, this image is a piece of shit and it shouldn’t have been shared at all.

Let’s start with a simple question. What’s the point of building a Minimum Viable Product (MVP)? Why do we follow this minimal approach, and why does it have so many fans?

1. It allows you to deliver the product…

In 2019, we were at the peak of prosperity. The global economy was defined by overproduction and overconsumption. It began to look like infinite growth could become a reality. I think we can all agree that our society and the systems that govern it weren’t healthy, even before COVID-19 arrived.

Without a doubt, the ongoing economic crisis, which will likely get worse, will affect all of us even if we aren’t directly infected with the virus. We’ll have to optimize our spending habits, find new jobs, postpone our holiday vacations, and change many of our daily routines.

However, every crisis…

React Native has been around for already 5 years. This framework made it possible to create native Android and iOS applications using React and also started a war between native (Swift/Kotlin) and React Native developers.

For the business and product owners, it represents an interesting opportunity how to unify the development teams, improve their velocity and lower the costs. At the beginning, we saw React Native to be used mainly by startups to build their MVPs or easy one-screen apps. However, as time passes by we can see more and more mature and robust apps using React Native.

During my…

With all the ideas and feedback coming from your customers, colleagues, and stakeholders it might be hard to calm your mind and focus on what’s really important for your customers. For every customer-centric organization, keeping customers satisfied is non-negotiable. But what features will make your product as right as rain? And what’s this secret sauce that gets your customers over the moon?

Don’t find customers for your products, find products for your customers. — Seth Godin

The Kano Model has all the answers for you. It helps define the attributes of products and services which directly lead to better satisfaction…