Products start as a vision, but eventually they’re just about the user
With the passing of Doug Engelbart people are asking where the visionaries have gone?
But at the same time, we seem to have lost the kind of big-picture thinking that Engelbart and others specialized in: the kind that didn’t have as its focus a specific market where things could be sold, or a better way of targeting advertising, but a vision of a world that could be changed for the better in some dramatic way through the use of technology — and a way of connecting the dots to show us all how we might be able to get there. And we are poorer for that.
Talk of Engelbart reminds me of his contemporary, Walt Disney. Famous for Disneyland, Walt spent the last years of his life fighting for vision of a Utopian city - EPCOT, or the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow. One of EPOCT’s great benefits was saving us from the traffic jam, an enviable goal for many of these visionaries. Robert Moses re-engineered New York for the car, Brasília was shaped like an airplane to accommodate it. Apparently computers and cars ignite grand visions.
I’ve always been intrigued by these grand visions, they make for great art and architecture. They also seem to capture the dreams of the time. But most are just that, dreams. Walt’s EPCOT never got off the ground - the land purchased for it eventually used for Disney World with the EPCOT name slapped on an unrelated attraction. Engelbart was never able to turn his vision into reality, neither was Xerox PARC for that matter. Then came along Steve Jobs and Apple Computer. For those who were able to build there vision like Robert Moses, were hated for doing so.
Like many planners in the 1930's and 1940's, Mr. Moses did not question, as later planners did, the ultimate effect the automobile would have on the city, choking old streets with traffic and leading to the demolition of many neighborhoods to make way for expressways. Mr. Moses believed simply, as he stated in his 1974 rebuttal to the Caro biography, that ‘’we live in a motorized civilization.’’ He saw the automobile as a force that was bound to revolutionize the landscape, and he intended to help guide that process.
Grand visions vs. the user
As a Product Manager I can certainly understand the problem - lack of early input from users. From what it sounds like, Robert Moses cared more for his vision than user input. The user was subservient to the vision.
For a Product Manager, the user is king. We have our own ideas but they’re subservient to the user as Andrew Montalenti explains:
Ideas become data points, speculations, lines in the sand. Not things worth pursuing by their mere existence — instead, things only worth pursuing if they are *worth* pursuing. Startups spend a lot of time asking the question, “Is this worth it?”
Building games at Playdom you might think things were different as games start with a vision. A vision constructed from experience, research, and experimentation. Defining a vision and working it into a pitch is the fun part. When it’s green-lit, then comes the pain.As Steve Blank explains, startups evolved from being about execution to being about a search - a search for a repeatable business model. Console games were about vision and execution, building social/mobile games at Playdom it’s about the search. The search is painful as the vision changes, morphs, evolves. That isn’t to say the vision is thrown out but if it was a picture you could say it changed color, style, size, etc. But in the end, the vision is subservient to the user.
I would joke with co-workers that we weren’t in the dreams business but in the dream crushing business. We see how the sausage is made and it isn’t pretty. We look for every opportunity to gather input from users and test our vision, ideas - gather metrics, run A/B tests, conduct play tests, etc. And it isn’t just the data that is crushing, but the debates within the team that the data enabled. In my studio the only thing we could do to contain the arguments was to look to our entertainment proposition and the game’s vision as a framework. But as they say:
No battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy.
