Building Products Blind Vol.1 — Data Disrespect
Since launching ZeroToDesign in 2021, I’ve spoken to and worked with dozens of clients about their products. I’ve also done research on companies’ perceptions of Products and Design and learnt a great deal about how these companies build products.
As you can imagine, I’ve spotted some trends. If you ran a qualitative User Research study, results from 10+ users can become significant enough to find trends and have a high degree of confidence. Combining my experience in the agency with the 3 years of in-house Product development prior to that, I’ve seen a range of industries, products and companies that do similar things and make similar mistakes.
This series of articles will cover the common trends I’ve seen in companies that I’ve worked on. These companies typically contain at least one of the following attributes:
- Low UX/Design maturity — typically due to a lack of awareness & education
- Early-stage — they might be in the process of finding Product-Market-Fit
- Imbalanced Designer to Developer ratio — Their focus is on building and shipping features
- Project Management instead of Product — The PM is more tuned to sticking to timelines and being spoon-fed ideas than articulating a vision and prioritising effectively
As a result of these, they often are built blindly. Churning out features because someone came up with an idea, attaching poorly-thought out features on top of the original product and wasting an outrageous amount of time and resources while doing so.
So I’d like to help companies avoid that, avoid those that are already doing it continuing to do it, and avoid new ones from even starting to do it.
This first article is focused on Data.
Let’s get into it.
Why data gets missed
The cycle is actually fulfilled from the very start. Data gets missed in the first place because there was no data being tracked previously.
This is the reality often faced by people that just are not aware of the power of data and how easy it is to start getting it from Day 1. I use data regularly from Hotjar for our landing page, and from Medium to analyse the stats of my articles. It’s quite easy to implement, doesn’t always require stupendous amounts of code and is sometimes even built into platforms (e.g. Medium & Webflow).
The key is to start somewhere.
It’s always harder to start doing something than continue doing it. That’s the power of habits.
So because of this vicious cycle data is often missed. To get deeper into why the data is forgotten in the first place, it’s because as Marty Cagan puts it, most product teams aren’t actually product teams, they’re feature teams.
Feature teams are just churning out what someone inside the company wants, an idea that ironically came from investors’ target, which led to the ‘obvious’ solution.
I’ve worked in these situations before and it sucks. It takes a long time and effort to create change, but things like focusing on data can help you get there.
What missing data leads to
Opinionated & Subjective experiences.
This is very simple, yet horrible to witness.
When you lack a data point to latch onto or have one to strive for, the objective goes missing. When objectivity is lacking, subjectivity will come in, almost in a yin-yang way. It leads to some awful scenarios:
- Stakeholders will try and control what should be built
- Designers & Developers will complain about the constraints they’ve been set by people that don’t understand their complexities
- Features will be shipped that have no measurements
- Franken-products will be created due to a lack of vision and coherency in these forced features
The vicious cycle has a vicious chain subdued within it. Without data, it's hard for Product builders to fight back, so we need to defend ourselves and find a way to get data in.
How to ensure data is factored in
I’ve found that a lot of pressure needs to be applied to stakeholders to find something, and asking the following this powerful question can help them find that:
How do we know what we’ve built is good or not?
We can’t truly gauge if something was worth doing in the first place if we don’t have some measure of its success.
This question needs to be asked early and reviewed post-release. It can also help in a few other ways, which are beneficial to communicate to stakeholders that need to be educated in this:
- Having a measure of success allows us to develop the right experience to test that, and then allow for more success in the future to try and improve that datapoint
- Having data points will enable us to uncover insight in the future and go further when conducting user-research studies, by asking users about behaviour we are already aware of
These are the two most impactful benefits that directly contribute to better product development and will stop you from Building Blindly. Other benefits include:
- A more experimental culture for building products
- More thoughtful idea generation from stakeholders who want to contribute to product ideas & features
- An easier path to communicating success & improvement to the rest of the business
These are all great benefits that data can provide. It can make things easier for Product builders, while actually getting the business and its stakeholders what they want…
More customers.
More engagement.
More revenue.
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To more data-informed building!
Sakky B
Co-founder, ZeroToDesign
