PMs often cite experiences at previous companies when justifying product decisions.

Don’t do this.

Every product is different.

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Even the same product, at different stages of maturity, might require a different decision in a similar situation.

Blindly applying old experience to a new product won’t do any good.

Experience can absolutely be beneficial for generating hypotheses.

It’s also helpful for analyzing past successes to understand why certain decisions worked or didn’t work.

What you need is to get down to first principles. Make new decisions based on that. Not just doing a thing that happened to work somewhere else in the past.

Use “first principles thinking” to break the situation down to the fundamentals. Add in your understanding of the product, its users, and the market. Then explain your decision to the team.

But justifying a decision by saying it worked at your previous company? It’s not productive and, frankly, makes you frustrating to communicate with.

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