Product Management
Learning to Trust Your Product Users
How I learned to trust my users, in order to build products
When I first became a product manager, my eyes were filled with stars and the dream of building a spectacular, game-changing product. I imagined all of the people lining up to use my product. I envisioned the press coverage and notoriety my product will bring me. And I thought a lot about all of the specific features I would design. It was an ironclad plan; my first year as a product manager would set me on a fast-track to early retirement.
There was only one problem: I forgot about the users.
Clearly, my little product management fantasy was not based in any sort of reality. The truth was, I was building one particular product in a whole suite of industrial, business-to-business software solutions. The people that would be lining up to use the product would be doing so under the direction of their bosses. The press coverage would be a bit of marketing propaganda designed to drive sales. And the specific features I designed — well, many of those fell flat at the drawing board.
It can be fun to imagine the possibilities of a blank canvass and access to substantial development resources. A lot of this optimistic, imaginative juice is necessary for product managers to drive a product forward. But the starting point must be the customer. As a developing product manager, it can sometimes be difficult to accept the fact that you don’t know best. Speaking with customers, understanding their challenges, and empathizing with their problems is exhausting and frustrating. How are you supposed to trust the user when the user rarely knows best?
“ The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.” — Ernest Hemingway
To trust your users, you must look beyond the surface for the truth. Often times, what users say is not something you should trust. But what they do and what they need are things that, once identified, can be trusted. Just as a patient does not prescribe a medicine for themselves, a doctor may not always trust what the patient says is a problem. Instead, the doctor must look for the root cause of the pain, in order to diagnose and treat the patient. Good product managers take a doctor-like approach with their users, trusting that the users won’t deliberately mislead them, but knowing that users can sometimes be distracted by things that aren’t actual ailments.
One particular example of this stands out in my mind. My users had a large spreadsheet file that they used to import data into a product. This spreadsheet often had issues, since the data formats were inconsistent and messy. Hearing that my users were annoyed by how long it took them to upload the files, I created a new interface that included data validation and eliminated the need for the spreadsheets altogether. When we released this new feature, I was ecstatic. I thought to myself, my users will love this feature and it was my own creation!
Instead, the new functionality was met with even more frustration and even some hostility. I was shocked. But I shouldn’t have been surprised. What I failed to realize was that my users received the data in spreadsheet form. Now, instead of struggling to import a messy document, they were being forced to manually input all of the data themselves. Rather than solving a fairly small challenge, I created an even bigger problem for my users. In retrospect, it’s easy to see that I needed to have a better understanding of my users’ challenges in order to properly diagnose and treat them.
Trust, as I have written about before, is a difficult skill to master. Building trust and trusting others — with different backgrounds and needs — can take a lot of time and work. Even more challenging is learning how to trust product users. There will always be a patient that wants to self-diagnose, but doctors must be steadfast in their commitment to providing the correct treatment. You must trust the user’s needs, more than their words. Examine the problems, deliver the best possible solutions and see the results. In this way you’ll be able to trust your users.
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