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Steve Jobs Hated User Research. Here’s Why I Agree With Him.
People have no idea what they want, and product managers would be better served by writing tickets for their engineers. Here’s why your users’ overconfident predictions are garbage.
I’ve heard about an industry trend from other professional software engineers that I want to talk about in this article. Sometimes, product managers (PMs) prefer “talking to users” (user research) over the work of identifying and documenting features and bugfixes for the product.
I guess that’s because, as you probably know, writing down work items (“tickets”) is — in fact — work. It’s boring, and it sucks, but it helps the engineering team succeed. However, “hanging out” with your users on long video calls doesn’t exactly “feel like work,” because — well — it’s not.
(In fairness to full-time user researchers, who typically do things like time how long it takes users to complete certain tasks and may use heatmaps to quantify cursor positioning, most “user research” by PMs appears to be just a lightly-structured conversation, from what I’ve heard in the rumor mill.)
Typically, when the team doesn’t have full-time, qualified user researchers, then the PMs and/or product designers step in to fill that role. That would seem to make sense, until the engineers are waiting around for tickets and needing to do the job of those PMs and designers in writing up the tickets.
“User research” sure sounds like an important, work-related activity, right?
But user research doesn’t just take time away from supporting engineering teams that almost universally don’t have enough coders; it’s not actually useful in the first place. This was a sentiment that Steve Jobs agreed with:
“People don’t know what they want until you show it to them. That’s why I never rely on market research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page.” — Steve Jobs
Here’s why I wish PMs would spend their “user research” time writing up tickets for the engineering team…
