User Interviews Considered Harmful - by Bani Singh

I have now been building products from zero to one for the last four years: some commercially successful, some not. Along the way, I have often been given the advice that it’s important to talk to users before you build, to help ensure that you build something that people actually want.

Four years later, I believe this conventional wisdom does more harm than good. The big problem is that users frequently are not truthful about their wants and needs: whether intentionally or not, they tend to state false preferences. In this blogpost, I want to share some of the failure patterns that I have seen along the way.

It’s a common pitch to build tools that make people’s lives or workplaces more efficient. In B2B, these are especially common: companies with slow processes want to invest in software to make them faster.

However, unless growth has slowed to a halt, companies are usually better off focusing on growth rather than process-optimizing to shave off a few hours or dollars here or there. I’ve seen many ideas that seem neat and clean, but are too marginal 1 to ever win adoption. Usually these are about replacing clunky communications:

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