When our new ideas fail, it’s usually because we were overconfident about how well customers would understand and how much they would care.
Jake Knapp, John Zeratsky, & Braden Kowitz in Sprint
I’m afraid to talk to my customers.
There, I said it.
As I was reading the book, Sprint, it dawned on me that yes, everyone knows that usability tests are important and yes, everyone knows that design thinking is important—but we still don’t do it!
Instead we decide to set up the hour long call with our engineers to think through new solutions, and ideate how we’ll release and test them in the market using fancy analytics. Yet deep down, every product manager knows the best way to build products people love and care about is to involve customers early.
So why don’t we do it?
I don’t know about you, but for me I’ll use a children’s phrase to describe my feelings talking with customers: it’s very scary.
Customers are the one group that could expose us—they could tell us how the tool isn’t working as intended, they could say they hate it, they could say it confuses them, and worst of all they could poke the illusion that our product is any good.
In other words, they can reveal to us that we’re really not as smart as we thought we were.
Building tools that people love and enjoy requires us to learn vulnerability. It requires us to have a deep and fundamental understanding of ourselves and what we stand for. But most importantly, it requires humility.
The practice of humility is very challenging—we’ve heard the lessons taught over and over in rom-coms on Netflix and children’s stories, but realizing that this is what it takes to really fundamentally change the world suddenly adds another level.
It’s not easy to be humble!
Especially when your title is ‘Senior Product Manager’ or ‘ Director of Product Management’. Much of the business world’s incentive system inherently exists to inflate our ego.
Humility also requires us to have to learn how to deal with disappointment and potentially embarrassment. We have to be willing to have the conversations that will ultimately tell us how we’re wrong, and that our genius idea actually isn’t wanted by customers.
It requires us to listen instead of speaking, to understand instead of convincing.
The most difficult part about dealing with disappointment is the feeling. Disappointment knocks us off the high horse without an easy way to climb back on board. It forces us to sit on the ground and, quite frankly, feel like shit.
I’m not here to offer answers for these feelings—particularly because I don’t believe there’s a simple answer to make the feelings of embarrassment and guilt go away.
But this is the barrier to entry.
If you really want to play on the stage with the great entrepreneurs and business leaders, you need to be willing to pay the price.
You need to be willing to give up the idea of being ‘comfortable’ and get comfortable with being uncomfortable. You need to be ok with the fear, the sadness, and the disappointment—because you know who you are and what you stand for. You are a learner, you are an explorer, and you are going to build and make great things.
To me, this was the missing advice in Sprint. We all know that talking to our customers is important, but the knowledge-action gap is one that will always persist. The future requires leaders to be bold—but the great lie we weren’t told was that being bold doesn’t mean glory, it means being willing to sit down, take the hit, learn from it, and get back up.
Can you handle that?
Sunjeev's Books 