You’re not your user
In my mind, as a product person taking product development decisions, there is usually a decision making process that you have to face with two extremes and lots of equilibriums in between:
The first extreme is product development based mostly on your own gut feelings. You have a perception about what market problems are, you could have been a user of your product at some point in your life, and hence you use your experiences and strong vision to drive the creation of a product you believe people would love to use. You might ask or observe the behaviour of a few users every now and then, but the truth is that most of the product decisions in this scenario are based on gut feeling.
The second extreme is product development based mostly on what your users say. You involve them throughout the exploration of market problems, the design of the product, getting their feedback for most product and design decisions, and as soon as the product is launched you iterate based on their feedback. In order to do this, you use qualitative or quantitative means, and finally, the decisions are taken based on “majority voting”, what most of your users want.
There are proponents and successful product launches from both sides, people with strong visions, who trust their own guts and believe they have a good understanding of the market versus people who build products inside communities and spend a lot of time and energy to involve users as much as possible through user groups, polls, user interviews, etc and base their product decisions on these findings.
After seeing multiple successes and failures from both extremes, my own verdict is that the true north of a good product should lie somewhere between the two extremes, with a strong inclination towards the community building.
It all starts with the realisation that even if you think you know what your users want, the reality is that you don’t, unless you go observe and speak to them! Even if you believe you have a strong market understanding, build a product based on your gut feelings and you risk launching something that only a few people will use, blaming the rest for not getting it. The reality is that market problems change so rapidly that you need to constantly re-evaluate your understanding of them. Nevertheless, if you focus only on your users, without generating a cohesive story, without understanding and putting your own vision and perspective in how all this fits together, then you‘re also risking a bad product launch.
This equilibrium is pretty similar with the idea behind the Double Diamond process model created by Design Council, a British organisation, in 2005, as a a graphic representation of a design process.
Each of the four stages is characterised by either divergent or convergent thinking:
- Discover — identify, research and understand the initial problem (diverge).
- Define — limit and define a clear problem to be solved (converge).
- Develop — focus on and develop a solution (diverge).
- Deliver — test and evaluate, ready the concept for production and launch (converge).
According to the model, product people should expand space for lots of different ideas to be discovered and shared. Then by focusing on user needs, identify and define priority areas to address. Next, develop multiple solutions based on the opportunity areas recognised. And finally, focus on distinct objectives to deliver a final solution. The four phases of the Double Diamond model may be simplified and merged into two main stages of the process.
- Doing the right things (Diamond 1 — discover and define). Whatever you do, look for the right problem to solve or the right question to ask before you try to do so. This is all about what you do.
- Doing things right (Diamond 2 — develop and deliver). Once you’ve found the right question to answer or the right problem to solve, you want to make sure that you do this the right way. This is all about how you do it.
So, I’d like to think the role of the product person as a keeper of boundaries. You set the broader boundaries, based on your vision and the story you want to tell your users and then you let all possibilities happen, putting into focus the users and the market problems. Because, at the end of the day, as much as we tend to think the opposite, we‘re not our users!
