𝗟𝗶𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗶𝘀 𝗺𝗼𝗿𝗲 𝗽𝗼𝘄𝗲𝗿𝗳𝘂𝗹 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝗻 𝗮𝘀𝘀𝘂𝗺𝗶𝗻𝗴

Everyone has cool ideas they think should work. And every Google window (and chat GPT) will give you best practises to implement.

It’s much harder to listen to your customers and deeply understand their needs and experiences. I did a focus group with some kids and a batch of usability testing with the company’s own employees last week. Neither group was the ideal candidate, but we got some really interesting insights that wouldn’t have come out of anyone’s minds or the literature.Those insights can be used to improve the current version of the product.

The real benefit is where you make this an ongoing process; ongoing surveys, usability testing, heatmaps, quant stuff. All of the different strands adding up to give you a picture of what the future could look like. It’s the iterative layering of insights that leads to product breakthroughs.

What is tough is realising that we don’t need to have all the answers all the time. It’s good not to know, and to be guided by what we learn (but tough to remove our ego for long enough to realise what is evidence and what is opinion)