How to bridge the divide between stakeholders and users

Anyone who has built products for a while has done it: shipped something internal stakeholders love, and users don’t.

It’s the “Curse of Knowledge.”

This cognitive bias is a psychological classic: The more we know, the less we can relate to others who know less.

So how do you break this down in the product development process?
There are 3 important ways to de-risk & build something users love:

1. Continuous discovery
2. Prototype testing
3. Narrative control

This is especially important for features that are large eng investments.

1. Continuous discovery

If you keep your solution focus process trained specifically on providing solutions to user problems, you stay glued to the user.

Opportunity — Problem — Solution is the key pattern. This sequencing helps you build something for users, not stakeholders.

2. Prototype testing

Make the rubber hit the road before you go to engineering. Plan far enough ahead so you can put the prototytpe or mock in front of users. This allows you to easily spot views of an animals butts instead of their fronts.

3. Narrative control

The Curse of Knowledge will infect your process if you allow cross-functional and leadership discussion to be focused on design decisions.

Bringing it back to the:
A. Business goal and
B. User problem

It provides a more fruitful discussion with stakeholders. That narrative control helps you evaluate shipped solutions in the context of progress towards the business and user goals.

Otherwise, despite all the continuous discovery & prototype testing, there will be a gravitational pull towards specific implementations catered to experts.