Why I Study Psychology to Build Better Products

4 MINS

My background in psychology wasn't the typical path to product management. But it's become my secret weapon. Understanding how people think, decide, and behave makes everything else in product development clearer.

Behavior, Tech, and Strategy

I gravitated toward product because it's where behavior, tech, and strategy meet. Every product decision is ultimately a bet on human behavior:

Will users adopt this feature?

Will partners trust this change?

Will stakeholders support this direction? Psychology doesn't give you certainties. It gives you better questions and frameworks for finding answers.

Insights from Research

During my time conducting Industrial/Organisational Psychology research at Taiwan's Ministry of Science and Technology, I studied employee work behaviour. The research involved designing multi-staged questionnaires, monitoring completion patterns, and analyzing reliability.

What I learned applies directly to product:

People don't always do what they say — Behavior observation beats stated preferences

Context shapes everything — The same person behaves differently in different environments

Small frictions compound — Minor obstacles become major barriers over time

Applied Behavioral Thinking

In practice, this means:

User research goes deeper — Looking beyond what users say to what they actually do

Feature design considers defaults — Understanding that most users won't change settings

Onboarding respects cognitive load — Recognizing that attention is a limited resource At Hikvision, applying these principles helped achieve 80%+ onboarding adoption. Not by making the product more powerful, but by making it more intuitive.

The Human Thread

As I've moved from research to startups to enterprise, one lesson persists: products are for people. The technical architecture, the business model, the market strategy — all of it exists to serve human needs.

Keeping the human thread isn't soft thinking. It's practical product management.

When you understand behavior, you build products that fit naturally into people's lives. That's the goal.

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Edward Jou was part of the November 2025 cohort at Curious PM, alongside 20 other talented participants.