Something worth thinking about this week.
The IKEA Effect is the tendency to overvalue things you've built or created yourself, not because they're objectively better, but because your effort is baked into how you perceive them.

Norton, Mochon, and Ariely (Harvard/Duke, 2012) ran a series of experiments where people assembled IKEA boxes, folded origami, and built Lego sets. The result: participants valued their own amateurish creations almost as highly as expert-made ones. And they expected others to feel the same way.

In product teams, this plays out in ways that are hard to spot.

A PM spends three months designing a feature. By the time it ships, the feature has absorbed so much of their thinking that cutting it — even when data says it's underperforming, feels personal. The effort doesn't just shape the product. It shapes how the person perceives the product's worth. And that perception quietly overrides the metrics.

There's a less obvious version of this in UX. Think about onboarding flows where users invest significant time filling out a profile or configuring preferences. The moment that data doesn't save correctly, the reaction is disproportionately strong. The user isn't just losing a form. They're losing the effort they put into it. And effort, once lost, tends to walk out the door.

This works in the other direction too. If you want users to stay, let them build something early. Customize a dashboard. Set up a workspace. Name a project. The IKEA Effect turns small investments of effort into emotional switching costs, and that's more powerful than any feature list.

#career