Anchoring Bias

The first estimate, the first price, the first roadmap date — whatever number gets said first becomes the anchor. Every negotiation or refinement after that tends to stay within about 20% of it, no matter how much new information comes in.

This is why 'quick gut-feel' estimates given in a meeting commit the team more than the team realises. Why the sales team's hopeful date becomes the engineering team's deadline. Why starting a pricing conversation at £9.99 vs £29.99 changes where you end up, even when the 'right' answer is the same.

Knowing about anchoring doesn't make you immune to it — the research is depressingly clear on that. What helps: make sure the first anchor in any important conversation is one you've thought about on purpose, not one someone threw out in a corridor chat three weeks earlier.

A PM is asked in a Slack thread 'rough estimate on the sanctions screening project?' and, wanting to seem responsive, types 'probably 8 weeks, we'll scope properly'.

Three weeks later, after real scoping, the realistic number is 16 weeks. The roadmap committee's reaction isn't 'thanks for refining the estimate', it's 'wait, it doubled?' — and the resulting conversation is now a defensive one about why the team is 2× over budget, even though the 8-week number was explicitly a gut-feel placeholder.

The anchor did the damage. The correct response to the original Slack message was 'I'll come back with a proper estimate by Friday' — no number at all, because any number would have become the reference point for the rest of the project.