Real users are scary

Why you should assume you’re always wrong

About a month ago I had an interesting talk with a UX research intern. To complete his master’s thesis he was interviewing product (and/or category) managers to collect input on how they decide which digital products go live and why. During his research he discovered that a large percentage of his interviewees rarely spoke to users. He was puzzled: “How is that possible?”

His question is so fair from sooooo many different angles. Why do product managers do this? How do they know they are building the right product?How do they adjust their vision? How do they maintain influence on the direction of their product? Or even: How do they get away with it?

I would like to explore just one of these angles: Why do product managers do this? Or rather, why don’t they… And what are they missing out on? I believe a small change in mindset can help any product manager go out and talk to users: Assume you are always wrong.

So, why don’t product managers talk to users?

Real users are scary. Talking to them will throw you off balance and off your carefully thought out vision and product roadmap. That is really inconvenient, especially if you are building something on a tight budget with a tight schedule.

Here are some of the reasons (and excuses) I’ve heard from product people about not talking to users:

• They can ship new features within a couple of days so what’s the point anyway? Qualitative validation is inferior to delivering new software and validating with paying users, as Jason Fried shares with the Design Sprint authors in this podcast. If only I could ever be in this position! Life would be so grand.

So now let’s start with the real list:

• They have done their market research. They have been in the business for more than a decade. There’s probably not many new insights a user can give them. Their gut instinct guides them.
• They have already communicated a clear vision on where their company, competitors, regulation and the market are heading. They have eloquently shared this with a lot of people and it takes guts to backtrack on that.
• They don’t have the time. I have interviewed several product owners who said they were too busy building their product with their teams. They had no time left to talk to customers.
• Timelines are too tight. The feature needed to be delivered yesterday and another validation round might take a week. Invalidating the feature is entirely out of the question in this scenario.
• Current product performance is fine. The product has been on the market for more than a decade and the company is still making millions anyway. (Yes, I’ve worked in the financial services sector, how’d you know?)
• They solely rely on data (CRM and Analytics) for their user input.
• Legacy systems are a bummer. They cannot deliver what users might ask for. Getting input and raising false expectations is a big no-go.
• A gap in skill or disposition. Setting up a good test, asking the right questions in an interview and being an active listener is not easy and not for everyone.
• The old “the user doesn’t know what he wants” — argument: “Nobody ever asked for an Iphone”. Don’t get me started on that one, it’ll develop into a whole new article…

Why product managers should talk to users

Understanding user needs through iterative, qualitative interaction is one of the core elements of building a successful product. In his 2013 article (old, but surely not outdated), Kunal Punjabi describes the differences between validating market demand, validating the problem and validating the product.

Especially this final step is very complex as there are many solutions to a given problem (product development is not maths). In my experience it takes a minimum of three to four validations to be able to confidently deliver a new or improved feature to beta.

So there’s the first reason for why you should talk to your users more: you just cannot skip this if you want to build a good product. Sounds obvious.

Other, less obvious reasons are:

• Every interaction with a user will bring something unexpected, something new, something useful in a different way. Every user interview, usability test or proposition validation I have done has given me something I did not expect. Even if the insight was irrelevant at that time, it was input for my long term vision, future roadmap or food for thought for someone else I could share it with.
• You gain recognition from the people you work with, because your opinions are not just yours — they’re the user’s. This gives you the intrinsic authority to drive the product roadmap, thereby making your life as a product person easier. (Imagine this: Spending time with customers could actually save you time in corporate politics — BONUS!)
• Your development teams need you to do this and will love you if you do this pro-actively. It will inspire them to do more and you will never be the bottleneck during the sprint.
• You stretch yourself. Especially face to face interviews will take you out of your comfort zone.
• You build up a product validation track record. You can share this with the people around you. It builds your product’s story and makes it more compelling.
• You’ll have so much fun!!!

Now that we know what we’re doing and why we’re doing it, let’s talk ‘How?’ A simple tweak in mindset is all it takes to include more user interaction to your product manager toolkit.

Assume you’re always wrong

A couple of weeks ago I joined the 2 million+ people who own (and probably have read) a copy of “The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F***” by Mark Manson. I really enjoyed this review which characterizes the book as “Buddhism for Bros”.

However, there’s this one passage in the book (p.39) which I love and have lived by in my working life:

“Our brains are inefficient machines. We consistently make poor assumptions, misjudge probabilities, misremember facts, give in to cognitive biases, and make decisions based on our emotional whims. As humans, we’re wrong pretty much constantly, so if your metric for life success is to be right — well, you’re going to have a difficult time rationalizing all of the bullshit to yourself”

In other words: Assume you are always wrong.

This should give you the urgency to go out and talk to users. It implies you are not the expert on your user’s problem. Acknowledge this, ask all the questions and learn. Be humble and encourage the other to speak up and be dominant. You do not need to sell your brilliant solution (let the sales people do that). Assuming you are wrong makes you susceptible to other, new perspectives. And there’s a great side effect: it actually makes you a much nicer person to be around.

This does not mean the user is always right. I suspect your users are human, which implies they are wrong most of the time too…

This should make them a little less scary.

PS. That UX research intern is still looking for more people to interview and will probably soon be available on the job market. Help him out!