The PM Mind

You will almost never have all the information you wish you had before making a product decision. The key insight is that making a decision with 70% of the information and iterating is faster and more effective than waiting for 100% certainty, because the act of deciding teaches you things you could not have learned any other way.

Instead of asking 'how do I prove my idea is right?', ask 'what would have to be true for this other person or idea to be correct?' You will learn more from one honest attempt to be wrong than from ten rounds of validation research.

Instead of jumping straight to 'what should this look like,' ask 'what problem are we actually solving and for whom?' Analogies and prototypes are powerful, but only after you've defined the real problem — otherwise you're just dressing up someone else's old solution in new clothes. Think of it as writing the script before storyboarding: the script is still creative, but it removes ambiguity so every downstream step moves faster.

Signal is the piece of information that would actually change your decision. Noise is everything else — opinions, gut feelings, vanity metrics, or data that confirms what you already believe. Your job as a PM is to ruthlessly separate the two before committing to a direction.

As a PM, you'll constantly feel pulled between standing your ground on ideas and being open to feedback. The answer isn't to always compromise or always fight — it's to be very clear on the 'why' behind your conviction. When you can articulate the assumptions underneath your belief, you can hold it firmly and also know exactly what evidence would change your mind.