Day 155: Listening to Users
Sometimes people will ask for features that I don’t agree with or seem misguided. In those cases, I’ve wondered how much to listen to users vs. rely on my own product intuition when developing products.
It took me a while to discover the answer: Always listen to users, but focus on their problems, not their solutions.
People know their own problems better than anyone. So even when they ask for a feature that might not make much sense, there’s always an underlying pain point they want solved. Usually, asking the question “why would they ask for this?” reveals the pain point, but it can always help to ask them follow-up questions like the following (got these questions from the Indie Hackers podcast with Rob Fitzpatrick):
- Why do you want this?
- What would this let you do that you can’t do currently?
- How often do you run into this?
- What do you do currently?
People are not always great at coming up with solutions because they don’t have all the context that you do from building your product, but it’s still worth it to ask “why?” a few times to try to get at the underlying problem.
Don’t be like me in this interaction, where I only addressed their feature request and didn’t consider that what they actually wanted was just a way to solve their problem:
