The Hazard of User Focus
Don't let your users distract you
thehilker
1 min read·
Users & customers are just as likely to distract or lead you astray as they are to lead you to the promised land.
This doesn't mean you don't listen to them often and take them seriously; it doesn't mean they're dumb, you’re smart, and that you can make all kinds of assertions on their behalf. It means that your promised land is not their responsibility. You can't do this without users and yet if you just rely on users to guide your decision making, there’s a good chance of distraction away from the goal.
It means that it’s up to you and your team to manage the many factors and tensions that pull on a business — users & customers being only a few of them. It means their interests are not always your interests. Your interests are most likely a very narrow sliver of their interests. You need to understand their context and your context so that you can evaluate the multi-faceted tradeoffs of each major decision. You need to find & follow the overlap between what you’ve set out to do and what they need.
/lounge Day 9 is from the crowd 👀👀👀 How do you strike a balance between executing on your vision and the lindy wisdom to “just talk to your users”?
I think every truly powerful vision is informed by a deep and empathetic understanding of a user base. You see the future where their problem is solved and only start marching bc you understand something meaningful that others don’t. Talking to users over time is how you shape the block of marble into sculpture.
You want to get to California? Great. But you'd better talk to more than a couple people to figure out how you're going to get there. One will have outdated information, another will talk you out of it bc their cousin almost died. The report in STL in October is different than Denver in March. And the shovel guy...
Incidentally, I wrote this the other day after reading some sort of drivel on "just listen to your users". https://paragraph.xyz/@oo/the-hazard-of-user-focus
My vision is related to a "cryptographic cloud". NFT, Memecoin, and Farcaster devs don't care about that. However, there are things within that vision they do care about. We constantly talk to customers to match the current thing with the vision. You need short-term adoption to achieve a long-term vision
I talk to users as much as I can, but I have my own framework and approach to how I act on that feedback
what’s the framework?
Oh I’ve never documented it. It’s in my head. 🙃
I don’t know. Balance hard. I only know struggle.
For us I think it's actually curbing our want to actually help clients, and putting a bit more emphasis on how we can continue to grow and scale the business. There's a difference between the "helping the client" and the "improving the business so we can help the client better in the future". Hard to do.
https://paragraph.xyz/@oo/the-hazard-of-user-focus