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.

Dr. Derek Austin 🥳
Career Programming
Published in
10 min readJul 31, 2024
It makes sense that Steve Jobs hated user research because he loved “first-run experience.” Photo: AB Unsplash

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…

Career Programming
Career Programming

Published in Career Programming

Programming career advice for professional software engineers

Dr. Derek Austin 🥳
Dr. Derek Austin 🥳

Written by Dr. Derek Austin 🥳

Hi, I'm Doctor Derek! I've been a professional web developer since 2005, and I love writing about programming with JavaScript, TypeScript, React, Next.js & Git.

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