You Can’t Know and Not Know at the Same Time
Much as We Think
I had a conversation this weekend with a young client. He’s building a wonderful product. When I asked him to define his ideal customer he said, “That person is just like me.”
I said, “Hold on, cowboy. Can’t be so! It absolutely, positively has to be someone other.”
One of the hardest parts of making products or designing services is remembering that we can’t possibly reflect the customers that we want to serve. Our customers will never have the intuitive detail and benefit of the thinking behind the product that we have. Things that are obvious to us. They will entirely miss until we tell them.
It’s another reason why we can’t check our own. If we know the thinking that went into it, we can’t find the hidden assumptions or the parts that are missing. We already know why we did what we did.
When we invite an intelligent outsider to table to look with “fresh eyes” and a “fresh mind,” that person won’t necessarily understand when he or she encounters the places where we skipped a step in laying out the logic.
It’s a simple case of you can’t know and NOT know at the same time.
Or as it was Barbara Kiviat said in such a memorable way . . .
When you hear a tune in your head, it’s tough to put yourself in the position of a person who doesn’t. –BARBARA KIVIAT, Time
Hope I didn’t stick some sticky song in your head.