All Mental Models are wrong. Some, are useful.

👋🏼 Hi, I’m Moiz. I'm a Fractional Head of Product who helps top climate-tech teams build product from strategy, discovery, to execution. You’re receiving this because you’re building in climate and we’ve crossed paths. Each issue distills one proven concept that I use with my clients - and gives you a way to apply it to your work.

Confirmation bias is killing your ability to ship a great product.

And without a great product under your name, it's hard to get promoted or poached.

Often when building product, are wired to search for and interpret information that confirms our prior beliefs.

Unfortunately, our mental model of the world does not represent reality.

In fact, our mental models are often based on a set of untested assumptions.

Without checking our bias, we confuse activity with progress — and ship the wrong thing with full confidence.

The PM who ships a great product ruthlessly tests assumptions and then builds.

Yes, there's a framework for checking your biases. However, to become a great builder, this skill must become innate.

It starts with a pencil, a paper and a stranger sitting across from you.

When I train Product Managers on AI Powered Customer Discovery, we start with pen and paper. We build a foundation of empathy skills and then turbocharge them with Claude.

Here's what's inside:

• Why cognitive bias is the silent product killer most teams never name
• What mental models are — and why they're both your superpower and your blind spot
• A technique from fine arts that resets how you see your customer — and why I teach it in every cohort

Worth Repeating

"The brain creates symbols for much of everything we encounter. Think shortcuts or icons. Once this pattern gets set cognitively, it's difficult to draw a head that isn't a circle. And heads are not circles."

— Betty Edwards, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain

Blind Contour Drawing - the exercise that resets how you see

I pair people up, each with pen and paper. The instruction is simple: draw the face of the person in front of you. But you can't look down.

Your eyes follow the edges of their face. Your hand follows your eyes. You never look down. The drawings come out wrong. Everyone laughs.

And then I explain why that’s exactly the point.

Two reasons we do this exercise:

1. Get Present
2. Remove Bias

You cannot be distracted when you’re drawing someone’s face without looking at your hand. Your full attention goes to the person in front of you. That’s the first skill of discovery — being fully present with the human you’re trying to understand.

The moment you look away from the subject, your brain fills in what it thinks a face is supposed to look like. Blind contour drawing forces you to draw what’s actually there — not the symbol your brain has stored for “face.” That’s not just an art technique. That’s customer empathy.

We all have mental models

A mental model is an internal representation of how something works.

We build them constantly — about customers, about markets, about what good product looks like. They're how we make decisions fast without starting from scratch every time.

A PM with 10 years of experience has a rich mental model of how customers behave, what they want, and what they'll pay for. That's a superpower. It makes them faster, sharper, and harder to fool.

But here's the thing about mental models: they're also filters. They shape what you see — and what you miss.

The PM's mental model says: customers want speed. So the roadmap optimizes for speed.

Engineering's mental model says: the technical debt is the real problem. So every planning session becomes a debate about infrastructure.

Everyone is building from their internal picture instead of focusing on the Product Outcomes.

Cognitive Bias is the mental model gone wrong

Cognitive bias is what happens when your mental model stops being a useful shortcut and starts distorting what you see.

Daniel Kahneman — the Nobel Prize-winning psychologist behind Thinking Fast and Slow — spent his career studying this. He found that 90 to 95 percent of decisions happen automatically through what he called System 1: fast, intuitive, unconscious thinking that runs on pattern recognition and past experience.

System 1 is efficient. It has to be. You can't slow down and reason through every decision you make in a day.

But System 1 is also where cognitive bias lives. Confirmation bias — you see evidence that confirms what you already believe.

For product teams, this plays out like this:

The PM runs discovery conversations but only hears the feedback that confirms the roadmap she already built.

The engineer evaluates a new framework through the lens of every painful migration he's survived.

The designer presents three options but has already decided which one is right.

Nobody is doing this on purpose. System 1 is just doing its job — efficiently filtering the world through the lens of what it already knows.

The result: teams build from assumption, not observation. And they don't know they're doing it.

What happens when you eliminate bias?

This is the transformation that blind contour drawing is actually teaching.

When you remove the shortcut — when you can't rely on the symbol your brain has stored for "face" — you start to actually see. The asymmetry of an eyebrow. The way a jawline doesn't follow the shape you expected. The details that are only visible when you stop drawing from memory.

For a PM, that same shift looks like this:

• You stop going into a customer conversation to confirm what you already think.
• You stop putting features on the roadmap without validating the assumptions first.
• The roadmap review gets easier to defend. Because the assumptions underneath it have been tested.

And when you build from the mindset of eliminating bias, the product gets better.

The features you kill get easier to kill. Because you have evidence, not instinct.

That's the PM who ships.

Not because they work harder or move faster.

Because they see more clearly.

From Insight to Action

Blind contour drawing is just one pen and paper one exercise from the first session of Cohort 5.

If you want to build the habits that make you the PM who ships — the one whose roadmap is grounded in evidence, whose discovery conversations actually change what gets built — this is the cohort to be in.

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