Build the Right Thing → Build the Thing Right
Logic tells us to discover the right thing to build and then build it right. In reality, however, we often do the opposite. Here's why.
Successful product development happens in two phases:
Figuring out the right thing to build
Building the thing right
Most of us agree with this logic. Yet, we end up doing the opposite. We spend countless hours building the thing right, just to discover that it’s not the right thing. It’s what Steve Blank described as the first collision with reality few products survive.
Why do we act so “illogically”?
I think there are a several of reasons:
1. We think we know our user
It’s the most common form of myopia. It comes it two varieties (some suffer from both):
“I am the user of my own product, so I don’t need to do discovery. I intimately know my own needs and pain points. Others must experience the same.”
This is the so-called Self-Referential Research. You think your problems are a proxy for the rest of the world, and you usually end up being wrong.“I already know the answer, so I just need a bit of diligence to confirm it.” This is Confirmatory Research and is a notch better than the self-referential research. It’s still ridden with ugly biases and can lead you to magical places that don’t exist in the real world.
2. We misunderstand Lean development
The Lean Methodology is based on gradual improvement through rapid iteration. Often times, this approach is mistaken for “throw shit on the wall and see what sticks.” Teams release an early version of a product with no research to back it up. They think users will give them feedback, which they’ll use to refine their product.
The approach is sensible but there are two problems:
If our starting point is so off-target, it is going to take us a lot of time, money, and spin cycles to get close to the target. I’ve worked at corporations, which follow this approach. Unlike most of us, they have tons of money to burn, and no accountability.
Meaningful feedback comes in the form of data. It can come from speaking with your users (qualitative data) or observing how they use your product (quantitative data). Both approaches require that users actually use your product. If it’s so off-the-mark that no one uses it, then there is no data and no feedback.
3. We feel that building is progress and research is not.
Sometimes, research feels like the pre-game; the preparation for the real action. What comes before building the damn thing. If we already know what to build, do we really need to go through the motions of research?
The pressure to get to building, and eventually releasing, is even stronger if we have taken VC money. We’ve got milestones to hit, growth metrics to crush, valuations to conquer. Research is nice, except it doesn’t feel like doing the real act of building.
These are plenty of reasons to skip product discovery (figuring out the right thing) and go straight step - building the thing right.
But here’s the thing:
Now you know the excuses to skip research and you know they are bogus. So, you can’t use them anymore. The only thing that you can do is figure out the right thing to build.