Why Homer Simpson doesn’t run product
Homer Simpson once made a car called, aptly, the Homer. His long lost half-brother, owner of “Powell Motors”, give him carte blanche to create his dream car — a car for the “average” American.
For days, he slaved away drawing, designing, telling engineers what to build and how to build it. In the end, he came up with this design
The Homer:
- Had two bubble domes, so you could throw the kids in the back and not have to hear their whining
- Played “La Cucaracha” on it’s horns
- Sported a bowler as a hood ornament
- Came with tail fins
- And shag carpeting
In the end, this monstrosity of a car cost too much to build and caused his brother’s company to fall into bankruptcy.
The reason Homer’s design failed is in the first paragraph: “carte blanche”.
When you do traditional product interviews, you are giving your user carte blanche to dream up any possible feature they want on your product. Their answers are all aspirational — they are dreaming up the Homer.
How many times have you asked someone, “Do you think this is something you would use?”
Dreaming…
As Ron Williams, CEO of the startup Knod.es, says, “I’ve fallen many times for the trap where someone says ‘If only you’ll build this, I’ll buy it’.”
The problem is that once you build what they said, you find out that they actually don’t buy it. They may have told you with all the best of intentions but what they did was tell you a dream that required no constraints.
In the real world, we deal in tradeoffs. We are willing to accept things of lesser quality or with “good enough” features because we trade off features that are less important for ones that are more important.
In the “real” world, Homer drives a car like this:
And the reason he drives this pink sedan instead of the bubble domed Homer car is because he has had to made tradeoffs. Perhaps he wanted a green car, but when it came to a question of having a green car vs. saving money, he chose to save money. It wasn’t aspirational, it was actual.
So Nir Eyal , who studies the intersection of psychology and technology — likes to put it this way — when you do an interview don’t ask “What do you think of this?” ask them, “When was the last time you did that?”
Chances are, you won’t end up with the Homer….
