“Psychological safety isn’t about being nice — it’s about being real.”
— Amy Edmondson, The Fearless Organization (2019)
The Human Side of Discovery
Here’s the thing most organizations miss: judgment doesn’t develop through better frameworks. It develops through vulnerability.
When you admit “I was wrong about this assumption” without fear, when you kill ideas you love because evidence doesn’t support them, when you pivot after publicly committing to a direction — that’s when judgment grows.
Amy Edmondson’s research in The Fearless Organization (2019) shows that people learn faster when mistakes are treated as data, rather than a deficiency. Without this psychological safety, discovery becomes performative. Interviews occur, but inconvenient findings are often overlooked. Usability tests run, but only feedback that confirms gets heard. Teams cherry-pick evidence that confirms existing beliefs. Research on software teams confirms that psychological safety consistently ranks among the strongest predictors of team performance and innovation because it enables learning behaviours that improve judgment over time (Obasanjo, 2017). AI acceleration exacerbates this issue, amplifying bias rather than wisdom.
I learned this the hard way. Early in my career, leading product teams, I created an environment where people said yes to my ideas, not because they were validated, but because challenging authority felt risky. A team member eventually told me privately, ‘We built that feature, but no one felt comfortable saying it didn’t solve the customer’s actual problem.’ I recognized that courage immediately; I’d been the junior person speaking truth to power myself. I took the feedback as a gift. That moment taught me that psychological safety isn’t a nice-to-have; it’s the foundation of sound judgment and decision-making.
The challenge runs deeper than individual courage. Even in organizations that espouse flat structures, power dynamics shape which voices get heard. When product managers treat discovery ownership as exclusive rather than collaborative, engineers and designers stay silent, assuming ‘that’s the PM’s job.’ Senior voices dominate while junior insights go unheard.
User researchers face a particular challenge: they’re trained in evidence rigour and bias detection, yet their insights often get filtered through PMs rather than informing decisions directly. When research findings contradict existing plans, psychological safety determines whether teams adjust their approach or rationalize it.
Real discovery requires cross-functional sense-making. A user researcher observes patterns in how users describe their workflow. A designer notices that users are misunderstanding the navigation flow. An engineer sees users accessing features through indirect paths. A customer success rep recalls multiple support tickets about this workflow. A product manager connects these signals to a strategic question about information architecture. None would have seen the complete picture on their own. This is collaborative judgment, different perspectives combining to form an understanding that no single function could achieve.
Over time, something even more valuable happens. Engineers who participate in discovery with customer success start asking different questions about architecture. Designers who review analytics with engineers propose solutions aligned with observed behaviour patterns. Product managers who examine implementation complexity develop intuition for feasibility. You’re not just contributing expertise, you’re expanding your judgment by exposure to how others think.