Most organisations I work with don’t do enough user research. In early roles, I didn’t have the experience to recognise this. Now, often working with an organisation as a consultant or advisor, I come in looking for common pitfalls and issues that I can hit the ground running with, and a lack of understanding of the user is one of the most common ones I’ve seen.
I’ve come up with a (likely incomplete) list of reasons organisations find themselves in this position:
Immediate shorter-term incentives misalign with what’s needed for product/market fit
In some cases, incentives for the team/team lead aren’t completely aligned with building something users will value. The most common version of this I’ve observed is in the grant funding world. Non-profit projects and research projects submit a detailed grant proposal for building a product, often including user research in the proposal, but also already mapping out the product itself. If accepted, they may find it difficult to deviate from this plan based on user research outcomes, which in turn limits the efficacy of that user research, if done at all. And ultimately, their funding is predicated on checking off the list they submitted in the proposal, not building something people actually value. All too often, this results in teams rarely engaging with users until the project/product is already “done”. In reality, the work to build something useful has often just begun.
Why is this the case? No one will disagree that conducting user research is important, but again and again I see organisations that are spending significant time and money building products without a comprehensive understanding of their users without realising how reliant their work is on thin assumptions.
Building for internal users and the associated politics
Sometimes, teams developing products for users in their organisation suffer from a mix of hubris (”we know this organisation, so we already know this user”) and bias (”Department X has been reliant on me to solve their problem in the past - I’ll build a tool for them that helps them solve that problem, but I’ll do it my way because if they’re coming to me, I must be the expert in the subject”). This leads them to think they can ignore internal users in the product development process more than they would external users. Politics can also complicate things here - the associated dynamics can undermine an unbiased search for the truth in user research (for example, product leads may consciously or unconsciously interpret insights in a self-serving way that may bolster their position in the organisation).
Sales and product siloing
Sales conversations cannot take the place of user research, and salespeople are not user researchers. Too many organisations see research as a task bolted on to sales conversations, leading to salespeople interpreting insights (with their own biases and incentives) to share indirectly with product people. This “filter” creates the facade of consistent user research, but can be more accurately described as market research - while we can learn a lot about what users will pay for and the competitive landscape, we lose insights about user challenges, motivations, and the associated insights that help us feel more confident about what we’re building.
Over-indexing on vision
Sometimes, a lack of user research is as simple as a belief that you know your users better than they know themselves. This situation is easiest to fall into at the early stages of the startup journey - you haven’t yet released anything to users, and so you haven’t yet had your first test of your vision. Anything could happen, and your vision may well be 100% spot on.
That may be true! But in my experience, it usually isn’t. In most cases, it’s better to just get in front of users as soon as possible. It’s hard to be an expert in someone else’s experience. Even when you think you’re building for yourself, you may overestimate the uniformity of your target market. What you think is a group of thousands of potential users just like you may contain far more nuance in motivation, pain points, willingness to pay, etc. than you think.
It’s scary!
There’s one common underlying cause for a lack of user research in all of the above situations, and sometimes this is the main cause: it’s scary to do user research.
While some folks may find it scary because they’re not sure how to talk to users - it can be an awkward social situation - I’d argue the overriding reason people find talking to users scary is because it threatens their current reality.
Every time we have a product or feature idea, we construct an assumed reality that justifies the idea. Until we get evidence otherwise, that reality stays intact, which can feel comforting. It’s uncomfortable to think that you’re not working on the right thing.
Talking to users is one of the fastest ways to shatter your assumed reality about the product you’re building, which is scary!
But beyond this, you’ll find a new assumed reality - one with stronger evidence backing it up, one with a higher likelihood of being close to the actual reality.
Some of the most fulfilling professional experiences I’ve had have been “frame-breaking” conversations with a user. Such conversations allow you to let go of one reality, but step more confidently into a new one.
In a future post, I’ll explore some strategies for encouraging more and better user research in an organisation. For now, I’ll come back to the original point on talking to users - most organisations don’t do enough of it!