Live In The House You Build #

The main reason that great products is because the people who build them use them. There is not a single person in the world more motivated to build high quality products than the team who is building it and will use the production version of it.

All the feedback sessions, all the user testing, all the surveys, all the other ways there are to collect feedback will not replace the hands on experience of the person who is also building it because that person also knows what is possible to build and the capabilities of the platform more than anyone else. 

There is no way to beat the team that experiences the issue their customers are experiencing and have the power to make a change because they have a deeper understanding of the entire platform. What might be proposed as a surface level solution by the customer will always have a better, more meaningful solution by the team who is also experiencing the same issue.

I am not talking about quality control, which in many places and in many sectors is mandated by law but by the quality of the decisions about the design, the way Steve Jobs described it, the things that go into the product and the things that are left out of the product intentionally so the user experience is better.

X is a clear example of this, for many years there was no features development made by the team, once Elon bought it and used it daily (a customer) and had the power to make a change, everything got better. They started launching clearing the features backlog and also started implementing new features faster than many other social media companies which already were shipping features at an acceptable pace.

The iPhone, Basecamp, Substack, Shazam, Excalidraw (of the top of my head) are also examples of products used by the team that built them and you can see it in the final result, in the amount of thought that goes into it. “How would I like to solve this issue for me?”, “What is the actual problem that I have and how would the simplest solution would look like?”

The opposite scenario are the products resulting from all those outsourcing companies for whom when the project is done, it’s done, and tomorrow they will be working on another project almost as if your wouldn’t exists. That is because their product or service is the process of building products for others or providing some kind of service, not the final result.

“Will the people working on this have to deal with the result of it?” Is a good starting question when buying a product or contracting a service.