You know the situation; you are having a workshop concerning the roadmap. The room is filled with thoughts and ideas. But what is based on facts and data, and what are opinions and fashion? It is hard to tell the difference.

In one of my earlier startups during the dotcom era, we were confident that we based the decisions on facts. But one crucial decision on our mail and SMS messaging was based on entirely wrong information and was a direct result of data biases. Poor analysis by a management group had destroyed the data, and numerous sources then quoted it. When we thought we had useful data from multiple institutions, we only had one skewed analysis.

As we today are basing even more decisions on data, we need to rethink how we interpret it. We all know how easy it is to be misguided by our own opinions and thoughts. A great product manager can move away from biases and analyze the situation. To achieve unbiased decisions, you need to know the traps. The book FACTFULNESS by Rosling et al. shares ten common pitfalls. It also shares tons of tricks and attitudes to avoid falling into them.

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