I enjoy exploring connections between things that seem otherwise unrelated. While there’s a risk of my thoughts turning into fantasy, it’s what keeps my curiosity primed. Last time, I wrote about how emotional intelligence (EQ) can hone product management skills. Self-awareness helps build EQ, with mindfulness helping build self-awareness.

A common struggle of product managers is walking the tightrope between emotions and data. Emotions that come from customers, your peers, sales, executives, engineers, finance, marketing and others. Data that comes from various sources, some more open, some selectively curated. While it may not be apparent, this struggle mirrors what happened during the Scientific Revolution that led to more rational explanations for natural phenomenon.

…Wait, what?! What does the Scientific Revolution have to do with product management?

”…It is equally as intellectually lazy for you to say ‘Great!, give me those crystals’, as it is to say, ‘This can’t possibly be true, get out of here, you’re a charlatan!’” — Neil deGrasse Tyson, on the right way to approach someone selling magic healing crystals

If you haven’t watched Neil deGrasse Tyson’s masterclass on the scientific method, the snippet above is a simple nudge to curiosity. Just because we feel a certain claim might be outrageous doesn’t mean we stop being curious. The entire scientific revolution was driven by a period of intense curiosity, a period that challenged existing beliefs and worked through a structured process that we now term the scientific method.

”…It is equally as intellectually lazy for you to say ‘Great!, let’s increase discounts by 10% to drive growth’, as it is to say, ‘No way this drives growth, we don’t need your MBA knowledge!’” — Neil deGrasse Tyson, if he were to do a masterclass on product management

As a product manager, it’s a struggle to keep your curiosity primed when you’re juggling deadlines and requirements thrown at you from various angles. The psychology of curiosity is complex and fascinating, but a couple of simple definitions will help:

D-Curiosity vs I-Curiosity

Deprivation (D) curiosity: This is the sort of curiosity that feeds lack of information. For example, if your manager asks you to find out the annual customer churn metrics vs the annual revenue churn metrics and you are foggy on what exactly a revenue churn metric is, you’re going to work hard to find out what this means before trying to get the data and understand it. Once you’ve satisfied the information gap, you’re no longer deprived of the information, it feels good. This is D curiosity.

Information (I) curiosity: This curiosity drives us to seek knowledge, not to fill a gap, but simply for the joy of finding things out. The reward in I curiosity is the journey itself, not the end result. For example, if you now wanted to research if there were differences in churn for cloud-hosted SaaS offers vs. software subscription offers, you’d start going down a few rabbit holes. You may not get an answer, but you’d discover some cool stuff along the way.

“I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.” — Albert Einstein

Why it matters for PMs

If you’ve been asked to complete a task in a day, chances are you’re only going to have time to trust your gut, data be damned. Or, if the culture at your organization doesn’t make data easily accessible, you may have to trust your gut anyway, even if the deadlines aren’t that tight. Worse is data that’s incomplete or curated to fit a specific need. Decisions that stem from emotions or poor data kill curiosity; specifically, I curiosity. There’s no journey, there’s no luxury of going down rabbit holes. It’s one quick decision after another with every D curiosity stint providing the same dopamine hit akin to getting likes on social media.

So how do you manage to foster curiosity as a product manager? A simple method might be to find rabbit holes for yourself amidst the sea of little tasks. This may be easy in organizations that encourage exploration, harder in others. It’s also important to avoid getting dragged into pseudoscience with poorly curated data. If the rabbit holes you go into are peppered with bad data, you’d just be practicing cargo cult science.

It’s not easy walking the tightrope between emotions and data as a product manager but starting with building your curiosity chops is key. Once you do, you can practice the scientific method, applied to product management. That’ll be the topic for Part 2.

Rabbit Holes

The science of curiosity is fascinating. Dr. Jud Brewer’s explanation of I and D curiosity and tie-ins to anxiety are fascinating. The notion of pseudoscience — trying to manipulate data to fit a need and then getting convinced of outcomes — is dangerous. My favorites on this topic: