Conventional wisdom

 A reoccurring fallacy I've seen on numerous occasions is the application of conventional wisdom to a problem, it's important to avoid a product team to rely heavily on it as it obstructs innovation and decrease the application of a scientific process and rational thinking. The temptation is of course the use of something that you know, something that is true and something that you like, and the toughest issue of course the social part of your peers sharing that view.

There are numerous issues with conventional wisdom and the simplest one to understand but easiest to forget is that conventional wisdom does is not necessarily true. Wikipedia lists what is only a fraction of common misconceptions and I don't think anybody to have the right idea about even the few listed there. Whatever company you are working in is bound to have tons of business specific pieces of "everybody knows that..." that simply aren't true. Using these false inputs is not harmful at best, and the worst case disruptive in the worst possible way of outcomes.

A frequent goal of product design is to improve and change user behavior and the outcome from using the product. This change itself alters the context and leads to new behavior and this means that we must generate new knowledge about our customers and our own product. Few things are generic truths that can be applied mindlessly with expected outcome.

Any team should optimize their ability to experiment and analyze outcomes of their actions in order to be able to create the best possible knowledge. Existing knowledge should always be under scrutiny and be either reconfirmed or falsified and then replaced or expanded with further nuance. A key strength to achieve this is to engage as many brains as possible in this process, with the right team culture that will reduce the number of misconceptions you have a group will decrease.

It is very likely that the product team will face a lot of conventional wisdom from their surroundings and hopefully in most cases have strongly proven, recent and good knowledge to share as education. However an issue with the conventional wisdom which simply isn't true is that it has stuck for another reason, maybe you like it, maybe it's simple or beautiful, or maybe just has a nice ring to it making it easy to remember. This means any discussion questioning false wisdom needs to make a significant effort to correct any bad knowledge.

Carriers of erroneous conventional wisdom will hopefully want to get better knowledge, and this is totally aligned with your overall goals. However a complexity with wisdom is that just because there is ample proof of something being wrong, there is not necessarily available information on how it really is. The issue might be that the complexity of the problem can not be answered by a simple and knowable fact. In the design of any non trivial product you are bound to end up in a state where you know something just isn't the solution, even though you do not yet what the solution is.

In the end much of what is fun and motivating in product development is that there isn't a single known best way to things, keep exploring, keep learning!