From Assumptions to the Truth
I thought challenging our assumptions was enough, but it clearly wasn’t. After some mistakes, I realized it is misleading[incomplete]. Let me explain.
When helping entrepreneurs I have had one piece of advice ,“challenging your own assumptions”, that I have repeated to everyone. At first it seem like a good advise and I saw how people would go and talk to their customers and try to understand the data they had. Then they stopped.
We got passed the first real problem that was sitting and talking about things we assume and hintch we had to get real feedback and data. That is progress. But then we stop there.
Once we get real feedback and data, we tend to stop and transform this new “truth” into a new assumption. Example: we get data that our users read our news on mobile web. A new truth. So we go and build an app. This would seem correct from a first glance, but if we go deeper we might find that people still use the browser on mobile (just change the PC for the phone as the device to deliver this experience). We build an app and users still use Safari to read our news. We didn’t need to build it. Because we assume that the “truth” we found was the “real” truth, then we transform this new truth into an assumption.
After seeing the same behavior I have found what mislead to this action: lack of empathy. We tend to read someone’s behavior instead of trying to understand it. We don’t consider who they are and why would they say what they say.
Who are they? What is their story? How do they feel when they are using it?
We tend to assume that we know the truth by just talking to people and reading their behavior. It just a superficial view we have build with incomplete information. It’s like the borders of a puzzle. It gives us an idea of where to go, but there is still too much to discover. To be able to achieve the truth we need to conquer empathy. Unless we are humble enough to put ourselves on someone else's shoes, we will not completely grasp what we need to do to obtain the truth, and therefore build product that are really valuable to people.
