I loved the example of the vacation photo. It’s so true.
This reading allowed me to relive an experience I had this past summer during my internship. I was a SWE intern and spent the first 3 weeks of my internship doing PM work for a completely new product. My initial work involved reading a lot over the documents that a senior PM had gathered and written for me and then understanding her perspective to be able to under the needs of my users who had communicated with her earlier.
I worked on some user stories and decided it was time to meet up with my users to ensure that I was understanding their pains correctly.
What happened next was a blunder. The meeting was a disaster. The user stories I had worked on were far from what these users wanted. But this was not a misunderstanding on my end. The PM who had laid the groundwork for me didn’t actually understand what the users meant when they wrote down their needs for her. This led to her interpreting the needs differently.
It is not that she did poor research — her work was well researched and laid out, just in a different direction than what our users wanted.
She was kind and gracious enough to acknowledge this mistake and we did a better needfinding process and made sure we actually spoke and understood the needs of our users instead of reading and interpreting them. We made them tell us stories so we could understand their pains deeply. And this time, they were much happier with the results. They felt heard and understood.
On a slightly different note, I believe this is also why it is so important to conduct interviews carefully, in person (if you can) and if possible, record them, so that you can go back and ensure your ‘interpretation’ is the same as what the interviewee wanted to convey.
No one intends to create something people don’t want — it’s just that written documents alone aren’t enough. Humans are complicated and we need much more to understand each other
