I got my undergrad in Computer Engineering and moved on to pursue a graduate degree in management which led to a career at the intersection of technology and business. When people find out that I quit my job at Deloitte to go and get a grad degree in Psychology, I get all sorts of reactions from people (good, bad and outright crazy).

After all sorts of confusion I gave in and actually decided to revisit my decision and explore why I studied psychology or the more important question – what has my psychology education taught me. I don’t know how but without any previous psychology or arts/humanities background, I was still able to get into a pretty research heavy psychology Master’s program (I guess I also used my skills of persuasion to pull that off). I have my personal reasons for choosing psychology which I am not going to reveal here, but what I am going to focus here is only one aspect of how psychology helps me everyday at work.

Here is a concise version of how I feel psychology helps, in case you don’t want to read the whole thing.

Psychology provides you a better understanding of the human behavior. The knowledge allows you to influence people when you have to, convince them and also understand how to better design for them. Product development is ultimately all about the consumers, the users. When we are developing a product that is user/people centric, it is quite important to remember that your users/consumers are humans after all. Of course this doesn’t apply to every product that gets created. Psychology teaches you not just various theories, phenomenons and research methodologies but also provides you with latent benefits like how to learn, think and communicate which are priceless for any product manager. You learn about qualitative and quantitative research techniques, about how to find information and communicate them through speech and writing be it a research article or a business document. Psychology teaches you to bring in new and unique ways of thinking about your users thus making your product development process better and efficient. As I mentioned before, a product manager should never forget that their users are fundamentally human and never stop being the very humans they are and therefore account for that at every stage of their product use journey. Let’s face it sometimes we even have to design for stupid too. I have had someone ask me if my case management product can do their laundry for them.

Here is a detailed version of the same. Below I have summed up a few key takeaways for me from psychology (keeping in mind my engineering and management background).

Verbal Communication – In grad school, we used to have to come up with research ideas all the time, sometimes simply for the purposes of finishing a course. Problem solving is all about coming up with ideas, sometimes totally thinking outside the box (yeah I know b-school teaches you all that). One thing that several professors at Rutgers encouraged us to do was to figure out how we could explain to our grandmothers what it is that we do. It has more or less stuck with me and one thing I always do at my job is tone things down for people. Depending on whether you are talking to someone from senior management or the really old person who processes the mail, you need to be able to communicate with them appropriately as to what it is your product/service is trying to accomplish. Part of doing this is being a good listener. Psychology reminds you of the human behind the role of consumer or user or customer. Everyone wants attention and everyone wants to be heard, but don’t hear to respond, but actually listen to people.

Research and statistical analysis – Once you come up with a research idea, it is not all bells and whistles, you create a hypothesis and have to come up with research methods and a research design, it is a very scientific method to test your ideas. Atleast in the field of psychology random claims don’t work just because you are a human and you claim to know about how other humans work. Similarly to validate a product idea or even a product feature idea, qualitative and quantitative research methods come in very handy. You collect data, or analyze already collected data to find meanings that align with what your product and firm’s mission. But as a product manager, sometimes the data that makes sense to you means nothing or little to other people. So presenting data meaningfully catering to varying audiences is another crucial skill.

Critical thinking – One of the greatest benefits of studying psychology is that it hones  your critical thinking. All the various concepts, theories you learn in psychology make you stop and think differently about the world as you have always seen it. It helped me hone my analytical skills to evaluate not just the veracity of what I learnt but also to better understand why certain things are the way they are and how to perhaps change (or accept) them. As psychologists, we are trained to not just buy whatever people sell us but also critically question things as needed. For instance there was once a doctor who claimed MMR vaccine causes autism, but my question to that was wait a minute, what was his sample size for making such claims, too small for me to even write here  (https://www.badscience.net/2013/04/how-vaccine-scares-respect-local-cultural-boundaries/). Similar experiences have happened to me at work more than once, where people made claims with percentages and numbers, sensationalizing something and when you look deep at the claims you find out it is not statistically significant.

Literature search/review – Chances are your fascinating idea for a product or a product feature is not the very first idea ever (in rare cases it could be, but let’s be realistic now). You want to be able to go find out if someone else had similar ideas, what has been done so far with it, what can you do differently and preferably better. During my first semester at Rutgers, at first I was getting fed up because all we seemed to do all the time was just literature review, I wanted to jump into hard core researching, using methods like regression etc. But with time you realize how important and helpful it is. You don’t want to waste your time reinventing the wheel definitely not unless you have to.

Research writing part 1 – The dreaded abstract – First part of a research paper is always an abstract. When we used to want to submit articles to journals, first constraint we would get would be the word limit on the abstract. It used to drive me nuts, but perhaps it is one of the best things I learnt. Keep it simple and concise. As a product manager, if you want to write novels and stories of what you are trying to convey, trust me no one really has the time. In this day and age, people love shortcuts, people don’t even want to read books, but rather summaries of books. Nir Eyal’s Hooked (https://www.nirandfar.com/hooked) is a must read for any product manager but guess what I found in the apple bookstore, the 30 min version of his book. You see where I am going with this.  The abstract needs to convey the problem statement, your research methods, your findings, conclusions and the limitations all in less than 250 words in some journals (according to APA).

Research writing part 2 – The journal article – Writing a research paper requires you to put your thoughts across concisely and with proper references. You cannot just claim whatever you want and it definitely helps to have that discipline to back up everything with data almost all of the time. Unless of course if you want to go Elizabeth Holmes on everyone then yes sure why not write or say whatever you want.

Cognitive biases, influence, stereotypes and all the other fancy things – while people love trying to understand human beings better, the line that terrifies every psych grad when you talk to someone about a psychological phenomenon is – “well that was common sense right, you didn’t really have to study concepts and do research to find something so obvious.”  Psychology being all about human behavior, of course there are things which people think they know and that is simply because they are humans and it has to do with their behavior. But studying psychology definitely opened my eyes to human biases and heuristics and stereotypes (cultural, gender etc). As a product manager, awareness of human biases and being able to influence people is a skill that you cannot have enough of. As a product manager, you are the champion of the users, which means that sometimes you have to open their eyes to what they really want and not what they just think they will want. Back to can this product do my laundry for me? Well sometimes users have to be reminded of what the product is originally intended for. You can’t have a case management system also do your laundry, or may be it can, but seriously, what the hell? Similarly if you are building something on a global level, what works in the US will not work in every other culture, you want to make sure to account for that. Cultural, gender and age related stereotypes could very well matter depending on the product. Fundamental awareness of personality and social psychology and I/O psychology, definitely helps manage teams, users and other stakeholders by helping you understand their strengths and weaknesses and also knowing how to best communicate with them. You know you can even influence someone that hates you by simply asking for their help? Don’t come and tell me that was obvious to you.

Lastly, empathy – Empathy is not something that can simply be learned in school. But research has shown that empathy can definitely be cultivated. In my opinion the starting point to that is being able to listen. Studying psychology has definitely opened my eyes to better understanding empathy and applying it more consciously in my daily life. As a product manager, ability to empathize with product users, your design people and engineers is an unspoken skill that would differentiate from other peers. You have to be able to view problems from multiple angles to create better products.

All said, while I am not saying every product manager out there needs to go get a degree in psychology, yet it is definitely worth getting exposed to some fundamental psychological concepts to be a more successful product leader. It was really hard to capture in a few paragraphs how much I learnt while studying psychology. If you have any idea or thoughts that could be good addendum to the above, please don’t hesitate to share.