Users First, Ideas Second
Shear: You talk to your users first and then you have the ideas about the product. Almost everyone does it in the opposite order.
It's called product validation. If you find yourself thinking 'I'm going to go talk to my users to validate my product idea' — you've gone horribly off the rails. You do it in the other order. You don't talk to users to validate your product ideas. You talk to your users to have your product ideas.
If you find yourself thinking 'I'll talk to users to validate my idea' — you've gone horribly off the rails.
No Users, No Opinion
Shear: I have a rule for people who want to have a voice in product design — they better talk to the users and look at the data too. If you haven't talked to users and haven't looked at data, you don't get to have an opinion about the product. I'm sorry. The person who's actually done the work gets to have the opinion.
You can have ideas, but they get to make the call.
If you haven't talked to users and looked at data, you don't get to have an opinion about the product.
When People Still Disagree
Shear: When both people have actually talked to the users and both have looked at the data and they still disagree about what to build — which by the way is actually much more rare once both people have actually done that work — it's usually relatively easy to get to consensus.
But when it does come up, I've found it's better to just have someone who's in charge. Someone who's the CEO. Everyone agrees this person's judgment will be trusted and you let them make the call. Don't avoid conflict — talk about it, argue about it — but then have someone who gets to make the call. Anything else leads to decision-making that's far too slow for a startup.
Don't avoid conflict — argue about it. But have someone who gets to make the call. Anything else is too slow.
When You're Swimming Upstream
Shear: The arguments I've gotten into — when we try to do cross-promotion from mobile web to the app, it just doesn't feel great. It works. We like the numbers going up. But it's not really with the user's best intention in mind all the time.
Sometimes it drifts into — it's good for the company but maybe not for the user. When you're in those situations, that's usually when the disagreements come out. You're not arguing about the future anymore — you're arguing about short-term or long-term, best for the business or best for the users.
When you're arguing short-term vs long-term, business vs users — that's when disagreements come out.