Building for Ourselves
Many great products start from a personal pain point. As founders or early team members, we see a problem in our own world, feel it acutely, and set out to build a solution. This initial empathy can be a powerful motivator and a source of unique insight. However, as a company and its product mature, a subtle but dangerous trap emerges: we continue to build for ourselves, or for our earliest, most engaged users, forgetting that we are no longer representative of the new customers we need to attract for sustained growth.
It's an easy mistake to make. We live and breathe our product. We understand its every nuance, its history, its potential. Our power users, those early champions who've been with us through thick and thin, provide a constant stream of feedback, often echoing our own desires for more advanced features or refinements. The problem? This internal echo chamber, while comfortable, can lead us to develop a product that is increasingly complex, caters to niche needs, and ultimately becomes baffling to the very people we need to reach next: fresh, uninitiated users. This article delves into why this happens and how to maintain a crucial external focus.
Why We Drift from Our Users
The primary reason product teams and their loyal early adopters stop mirroring new customers is the inevitable accumulation of deep, often unconscious, domain knowledge. This manifests in several ways:
- Internal Expertise: As employees, we are steeped in the product's architecture, its upcoming features, its strategic direction, and the specific jargon used internally. We know the workarounds for existing bugs and the rationale behind every design decision. This makes it incredibly difficult to see the product through the fresh eyes of someone who lacks all this context.
- Power User Adaptation: Early adopters are often more technically savvy or have a higher tolerance for complexity. They invest significant time learning your product, forgiving its initial flaws because they see its potential. They become adept at navigating its intricacies and often develop specialized workflows. Their needs evolve from basic functionality to advanced capabilities and customizations that a new user wouldn't even consider, let alone require for initial value.
- The "Vision" Blinder: Founders and long-term employees are driven by a long-term vision. While essential, this can sometimes make it hard to empathize with a new user who isn't yet bought into that grand vision and is simply trying to solve an immediate, specific problem with the product as it is today.
This growing gap in knowledge and perspective means that what seems intuitive or essential to an internal team member or a power user can be overwhelming or irrelevant to a potential new customer. Features that delight the initiated might erect barriers for the newcomer.
When Inward Focus Stifles Growth
Consistently building for ourselves or our most advanced users, rather than for the next wave of new customers, has predictable and detrimental consequences for product growth and the business at large:
- Increased Complexity & Cognitive Load: Features designed for power users often add layers of options, settings, and specialized workflows. For a new user, this translates into a steeper learning curve, a cluttered interface, and a general sense of being overwhelmed. They struggle to find the core value proposition amidst the noise.
- Stagnating New User Acquisition: If the product becomes too difficult for newcomers to understand and quickly derive value from, acquisition efforts will suffer. Marketing can bring people to the door, but if the initial product experience is confusing or doesn't address their immediate needs, they won't stick around.
- Feature Bloat Without Impact: Teams can spend significant time and resources building features requested by a vocal minority (internal teams or power users) that ultimately have little to no impact on key growth metrics. These features might make existing engaged users slightly happier but do nothing to expand the overall user base.
- Missed Market Opportunities: An excessive focus on internal desires or existing user requests can blind the team to the broader needs of the unserved market. The truly transformative growth opportunities often lie in understanding and solving the problems of potential customers who are not like you or your current power users.
- The "Power User Treadmill": Catering heavily to power users can create a cycle where these users demand ever more niche and advanced functionality. While this keeps them engaged, it can continually divert resources from simplifying the core experience for new users, making the product progressively less accessible over time.
In essence, the self-as-user trap leads to a product that might be deeply loved by a small, core group but struggles to break out and achieve broader market success. The very act of satisfying the most familiar voices can inadvertently build walls around your product.
Shifting Focus to Your True Target Audience
Escaping the self-as-user trap requires a conscious and continuous effort to shift the product development focus outwards, towards new and potential users. It means prioritizing the needs of those who don't yet understand your product over the desires of those who already do.
Here's how to recalibrate:
- Prioritize the New User Experience (NUX): The first few minutes a new user spends with your product are critical. Is the core value immediately obvious? Is the onboarding process smooth and intuitive? Relentlessly simplify this initial journey. What might seem like hand-holding to you is often essential guidance for a newcomer.
- Invest in Continuous User Research: Don't assume you know what potential customers want. Talk to them. Observe them using your product (or competitors' products). Conduct surveys, interviews, and usability tests specifically with individuals who fit the profile of your next target segment, not just your existing loyalists.
- Define and Understand Your Target Segments: Who are you trying to attract? What are their specific pain points, workflows, and levels of technical sophistication? Recognize that different segments will have different needs. Your early adopters might not represent the larger market you now aim to capture.
- Listen to Power Users, but with a Filter: The feedback from your most engaged users is still valuable, but it needs to be contextualized. Use it to understand deep engagement drivers and potential areas for innovation, but don't let it dictate the core roadmap at the expense of new user accessibility. Ask yourself: "Will this requested feature help us acquire and retain new customers, or just satisfy a few existing ones?"
- Empower Product Teams with Customer Proximity: Ensure that product managers, designers, and even engineers have regular, direct exposure to actual users and their environments. This firsthand empathy is far more powerful than secondhand reports or assumptions.
- Measure What Matters for Growth: Track metrics related to new user activation, conversion, and early retention. If these numbers are suffering, it's a strong signal that your product might be becoming too insular.
While it's important to keep your existing customers happy enough to stay, the bulk of your product strategy and development effort must be geared towards understanding, attracting, and delighting those who are not yet customers. This is the path to sustainable growth.
Conclusion
Building a successful product hinges on a deep and evolving understanding of your target customers – particularly those you haven't won over yet. While personal experience and the feedback of passionate early users can provide initial sparks, they can quickly become blinders if not balanced with a relentless outward focus.
The most impactful product teams recognize that their own expertise and the habits of their power users make them increasingly different from the average new customer. They actively fight the gravitational pull of internal bias and the echo chamber of existing voices. Instead, they cultivate empathy for the newcomer, simplify relentlessly, and build for the market they want to capture, not just the one they already have.
Remember, the people who already use and love your product are, by definition, a biased sample. True growth comes from understanding and solving the problems of those who don't yet see your value – or can't navigate your solution to find it. Challenge your assumptions, get out of your own head (and your power users' heads), and truly get to know your next customer. They are the key to unlocking your product's full potential.