As a Product Manager, I can sum up my primary work in three lines:
1) Identify problem areas for users2) Find optimum / close to optimum solutions for those problem areas3) Prioritise execution of those features
When all 3 points hit the mark (which rarely happens), magic happens. (More on this later, though.)
It’s safe to say that this mindset spills over to my daily life as well. At home, during my commute, with family, with friends….so on and so forth.
Every small problem I notice, my mind starts looking at an optimum “tech” solution or an optimum process for it.
For eg: There’s a vegetable vendor who passes our house everyday. Since my mother faces health problems, I would really like the vendor to simple deliver the veggies right at her doorstep. Which means that I would want my mom to send a whatsapp message and the vendor can get the veggies on the 2nd floor without her having to climb up.
(This is just one small example and maybe a bad one, but you get the idea).
This, in an ideal world, makes total sense.
1. My mom doesn’t have to climb 2 floors up and down.2. She doesn’t have to travel, plan etc.3. The vendor gets guaranteed business everyday (at the additional cost of climbing 2 stairs).
However, the word ideal is the key here. There is a big assumption here that I make which usually is not true, and that is…
People want to make their life better at the cost of making a change in their daily routine.
I’m not saying whether this is good or bad. (Having read several articles, especially on medium on “optimising” your day, I’v come to realise that most of them are BS). I’m all for not having every second of your life optimized.
The point here is — every problem/solution combination always has this underlying assumption. What I have seen is that in majority of cases it’s not true.
Unless “forced” to make a change that improves their lives, most people prefer routine, however un-optimised it may be. And I include myself in this as well.
This, I think, is because:
- Routine is safe. it reduces unknowns, and as a result reduces failures
- Routine is predictable and once built as a habit, can be implemented with very less number of brain cycles
- Switching from routine means exercising additional muscles, brain cycles, and resources like time. This means additional effort
- Usually any switch in routine is not isolated — it means that other “routines” are affected. So you end up making changes in more than one of your daily processes.
- There is no time to think about optimising your life, because….life. Who has time to optimise life when I’m running from one task to the next??
Whatever the reason may be, the end result is still the same.
Inertia. Fear of new things. Fear of a new process.
What I’v realised is, identifying a problem and creating a solution is not enough. In fact, it’s more like 30% of the work. The actual work is breaking through the user’s inertia / habits and somehow convincing them that the new process or product is:
1. Better than the one before2. Easier to move into from your current process/product
… and any new process or product that addresses point 2 effectively will trump a better process/product that sucks at addressing point 2.
Ultimately though, no processes or products can fix something or someone who doesn’t want to be fixed.
