Six signs of the false consensus effect in product teams

Six things product teams say or do when the false consensus effect is steering their decisions, such as cutting features nobody in the room would use or treating colleague feedback as user research. Use it as a checklist in planning meetings and retros. The bias was first described by Ross, Greene and House in 1977. Koji helps teams test these assumptions by running AI-moderated interviews with people outside their own circle.

Where this appears

• The False Consensus Effect: Why You Are Not Your User

What's in this guide

1. "I'd never use that": A feature is cut because the people in the room wouldn't use it. Nobody asks the people who might.
2. Dogfooding treated as research: Feedback from colleagues stands in for customers, though colleagues know the product far better.
3. Personas that look like the team: The main persona shares the team's job title, tools and comfort with tech.
4. Surprise at the support queue: Tickets about things everyone supposedly knows keep arriving and get filed as edge cases.
5. One customer becomes all users: A request from someone who thinks like the team is read as a request from the whole base.
6. Skipping research as obvious: If nobody on the team can picture a different answer, the bias is at its strongest.