Build for the Users not the Business

Jul 6

To help re-enforce my points about a product leader’s focus on the user and not the business, I am constantly looking for product leaders who point out best practices that related to the product case. In his latest email, Ravi Mehta talks about three concepts I continually repeat when coaching clients. TL;DR - Focus on the User not the Business. Build to solve your user needs. Don’t lump all customers/users into one category.

The following is an excerpt from Scale Higher’s latest newsletter (July 5, 2022).

“Empathy is the product builder’s job. It’s a failure of empathy to collapse all users into a single persona.

Too often, companies build for themselves, not their customers. Companies focus on making revenue, not delivering value. They focus on time spent, not time well spent. They focus on users who pay the most instead of users who gain the most.

Build to make your customers happy in the long-run, not addicted in the short-run. Yes, binging is great for engagement metrics—until you burn people out.

Build to solve customer needs, not to optimize company metrics. If you solve customer needs, the metrics always follow.

Build for real people, not abstract cohorts and segments. A single customer conversation can be worth millions of points of data. It’s much more valuable to solve a problem deeply for one person, than it is to solve a problem shallowly for thousands of people.

We should put ourselves in the shoes of the people whose lives are shaped by our products. We should build value from their perspective, not from our perspective.”