The most important product decision is what you don’t build

Ask a team what they shipped this year and you’ll get a list. Ask what they killed and the room goes quiet.

When it comes to predicting people’s preferences, it pays to consider “the power of three”

An MIT team proved that it is impossible to get information about correlations from two-way comparisons alone. Correlations can be discerned, however, when large numbers of people rate three alternatives in their order of preference.

Decision theory — LessWrong

Decision Theory is the study of principles and algorithms for making correct decisions—that is, decisions that allow an agent to achieve better outcomes with respect to its goals. Every action at least implicitly represents a decision under uncertainty: in a state of partial…

The Psychology of Defaults: How Pre-Selected Options Influence Behavior - UX Magazine

In our increasingly digitized world, design is no longer just about beauty and usability — it’s about responsibility. Every checkbox ticked by default, every pre-selected plan, and every silent subscription carries a weight that goes beyond UI — it reflects the ethical stance of…

The false positive paradox explains why you misjudge risk

Here’s how a mathematical paradox distorts our view of news, safety and statistics

Welsh police learned this lesson the hard way during the 2017 Union of European Football Associations Champions League final. They deployed cameras throughout Cardiff, where the soccer event was held, and used automated facial-recognition software to analyze the footage. The software scanned the…

The Volunteer’s Dilemma - by Steven Pinker - Behavioral Scientist

Learning about something in public, even if everyone already knows it, can change everything—especially when and how we decide to help.

Enhance Decision-Making With Control Systems

Master the art of decision-making with insights from control engineering. Learn how mental models can guide you through uncertainty.

The Ability To Focus And Make The Best Move When There Are No Good Moves

"if there is one skill that stands out, it’s the ability to focus and make the best move when there are no good moves."

Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds

New discoveries about the human mind show the limitations of reason.

For an anaesthesiologist, intuition stands between life and death | Aeon Essays

For years, I practised medicine with cool certainty, comfortable with life-and-death decisions. Then, one day, I couldn’t

Binstack: Making a maximal multi-dimensional decision

Binstack is a technique for selecting the "single most impactful" solution when there are multiple, incomparable dimensions to evaluate.

The Art of Decision-Making

Your life choices aren’t just about what you want to do; they’re about who you want to be.

Precommitment: Intentionally Limiting Your Future Options – Effectiviology

I’m a Former U.S. Treasury Secretary. Here’s How I Make Hard Decisions.

The need for a sound decision-making approach in the face of uncertainty is greater now than ever before.

Is the Minimalist Restaurant Menu Over?

More than ever, diners need actual descriptions of what they’re eating

Cost Per Reasonable Decision (CPRD)

Note: With the arrival of my son, I’m slowing down on the blogging. Give me a couple months (or more sleepless nights), and I’ll be back…

The Paralyzing Effect of Choice - SuperMoney

Have you ever stopped to think about just how many decisions you make each and every day? Some choices are very simple, such as choosing to get up in the

Want to make good business decisions? Learn causality | Stitch Fix Technology – Multithreaded

In some organizations, earnest efforts to be “data-driven” devolve into a culture of false certainty in which the influence of metrics is dictated not by the...

Learning to let go: Making better exit decisions

Psychological biases can make it difficult to get out of an ailing business.

Making Good Decisions as a Product Manager

While product managers may not build the actual product, they do produce something very tangible for a team: decisions.

Square Defangs Difficult Decisions with this System — Here’s How

Gokul Rajaram shares a framework that he's used at Square and Caviar to make the most difficult decisions, all while assigning ownership, being inclusive and coordinating execution among all stakeholders.

The Art of Decision Making as a Product Manager

Product managers have to make many decisions every day, including product prioritization decisions, product design decisions, bug triage decisions, and many more. And the process by which a product

Making Decisions Under Uncertainty

Or, How to Decide with Incomplete Data

6 decision-making techniques all Product Managers should know

How to productively make collaborative decisions

How cultures around the world make decisions

Is the American obsession with individual freedom really such a great idea? What other cultures know about how to make good choices.

16 Rules for Effective Decision-Making | The Leading Blog: A Leadership Blog

Leadership Now is a leading source for leadership development and analysis. We believe that anyone can make a difference by leading from where they are.

A Simple Way to Improve the Pro-Con List to Make Better Decisions

Seymour Schulich offers a meaningful improvement to the simple pro-and-con list that many of us have used to make decisions.

Why We Use Less Information Than We Think to Make Decisions

How much information do you need to make up your mind? Our research in various domains of decision making shows that we make decisions more quickly and based on less information than we think. This has important implications in an age in which information is plentiful.

Smart decisions

Learning to make smart decisions helps you get better results. This guide is packed with time-tested real world tools you can use today.

The Neuroscience Behind Bad Decisions | Quanta Magazine

Irrationality may be a consequence of the brain’s ravenous energy needs.

Mathematicians suggest the "37% rule" for your life's biggest decisions

The 37% rule states that when making any major decision in life, reject the first 37% in a list and choose the next best that comes along.

The Science of Familiarity: Increasing Conversions by Being Unoriginal

Familiarity has a major impact on our decision-making process. Understanding the psychology behind it will lead to better UX / design, copy and CTAs.

Decision-Making: Research Shows What Happens When We Wait for “Something Better”

Terrible at making decisions? A 2020 study reveals just how much our expectations drop while taking the time to decide on something.

http://algorithmsbook.com/files/dm.pdf

How To Ask the Right Questions, From a Bomb Disposal Officer

Use this framework to put decision-making theory into practice

Declinism: how rosy retrospection impacts decision-making

“It was better before,” says your friend. “Ha, those were the days,” your reply with a sigh. Declinism is the belief that societies tend towards decline, often linked with rosy retrospection—our tendency to view the past more favourably and the future more negatively. It may…

Research: How to Get Better at Killing Bad Projects

Most innovation managers know that few of their initiatives will succeed, so they keep multiple projects running at the same time and create processes for quickly separating winners from losers. One popular way to make decisions about what stays and what goes is the use of stage…

The OODA Loop: How Fighter Pilots Make Fast and Accurate Decisions

The OODA Loop is a four-step process for making effective decisions in high-stakes situations. It involves collecting relevant information, recognizing potential biases, deciding, and acting, then repeating the process with new information. Read on to learn how to use the OODA…

How To Reduce Decision Noise - Commonplace - The Commoncog Blog

Five ways to do noise reduction, from the field of judgment and decision making.

Reduce Noise, Not Cognitive Biases

Results from the BIN paper, or why reducing noise in your decision making is far easier than fighting your cognitive biases.

Survival Metrics Are a Powerful Product Tool. Here’s How They Work.

Product teams often know that a project needs to change direction, but they don’t have a way to make that change safely and quickly. Survival metrics empower them to do just that.

How to Stop Endless Discussions with RFCs

When we find ourselves in endless debates where everyone defends their idea, we don't know how to handle the situation. We eventually find a way out, but what we need is an excellent system.

Technical Decision-Making and Alignment in a Remote Culture

In a world of asynchronous communication, it’s more important than ever to create inclusive and remote-friendly collaboration, decision-making, alignment, a...

War Books: The Art of the Decision

Editor’s note: Welcome to another installment of our weekly War Books series! The premise is simple and straightforward. We ask an expert on a particular subject to recommend five books […]

How to make hard decisions

Don't not do what you wanna do.

Decision Table Patterns

Decision tables are easy, simple, and powerful. You can teach them in five minutes and write one in half that time. You can look at a table and understand what it’s saying, see if it matches your problem, and check for design flaws. So it’s kinda weird that there’s basically…

Reinforcement Learning, Part 3: The Markov Decision Process

MDP in action: the next step toward solving real-life problems with RL and AI

Decisions, Decisions or Why Baskets of Options Dominate

“Crazy. They believe that an option on a basket is better than a basket of options.” My interjection abruptly halted the executive…

On Humility and Making Better Decisions

Dr. Daniel Kahneman features on the latest Farnam Street podcast and it’s a surprising episode. Kahneman wrote Thinking Fast and Slow. I admire Kahneman a great deal. Not for his Nobel or for his work, which are both impressive, but for his humility. Some of the key tenets of…

Why “Many-Model Thinkers” Make Better Decisions

Organizations are awash in data — from geocoded transactional data to real-time website traffic to semantic quantifications of corporate annual reports. All these data and data sources only add value if put to use. And that typically means that the data is incorporated into a…