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This sentiment really bothers me. It's frequently used to disadvantage candidates from positions because they're not users of the service or product. It's just

This sentiment really bothers me. It's frequently used to disadvantage candidates from positions because they're not users of the service or product. It's just not generally true, but it's often repeated as though it were. It's demonstrably not true that you must be a user of a product to build a good product. To pick a random example: I doubt all pacemaker firmware developers have heart conditions that require pacemakers. I can conjure plenty of similar examples--some from my own work history. That's not to say you shouldn't empathize with your users. You should. And, that's not to say it's not sometimes an advantage to also be a user of a product or service. I suspect it can be an advantage in many circumstances. But, I don't think it's a necessary condition to make something really good.

mlthoughts2018 8y ago
I work for a company that makes a very popular social app and I don’t use the app whatsoever, and refuse even to download early adopter versions to test. Sometimes people at work give me crap for this. But they know my engineering contributions are among the best in the company, so what can they say? It’s foolish to disqualify people for this. Imagine saying men cannot ever work for a team that delivers feminine hygiene products, or a woman can never work for a product team that makes male health products.
- testb 8y ago
  Hm the advice to be a user would apply for startup founders right? I definitely wouldn't expect engineers to be active users especially in a more mature company with PMs.
  - mlthoughts2018 8y ago
    Why founders? It seems like that will be true for some businesses and not others. Case by case basis.
    - testb 8y ago
      True, best not to make generalizations.
    - nostrademons 8y ago
      It's true in any business where the primary risk is understanding what to build and not how to build it. That's not all businesses - for things like medical devices, avionics, high-performance computing infrastructure, self-driving cars, etc. it's very clear what the product needs to do, and not all that clear how to do it. But those businesses usually require deep industry knowledge and advanced technical education (in a field other than software), and you're slotting into an existing market structure rather than creating a new one. That means the potential market sizes are smaller, the risks are better judged by people with advanced technical degrees, and the effectiveness of capital is less. All those make them a poor fit for YC.
      - mlthoughts2018 8y ago
        Even when the primary risk is that you’ll build the wrong thing, there would be cases where paying a market research firm to compile advice on that topic that balances current customer requests against other things, like forecasts of industry or demographic or supplier or political trends, is a vastly better use of time than having the founders sit and use a product and develop their own idiosyncratic (and likely ignorant) idea of what to improve, or to oscillate between different focus points based on possibly incoherent or inconsistent customer feedback.
        nostrademons 8y ago
        I have yet to meet a startup for whom hiring a market research firm and depending upon the results in the report gave them useful information that turned into a big opportunity. There's a simple reason for this: if such a report exists, then a big company who actually has money has already hired that market research firm and executed on those results, and that market opportunity is closed.
        8y ago
irq-1 8y ago
Being "a user of your own product" is a cheap proxy for caring about quality.
thecleaner 8y ago
The pacemaker example doesn't resonate with me. Its a very well-posed problem - don't let the patient die. You don't have to be user to understand how to make things better. For things like personal computing its a bit different. Problems are very ill-posed and often the question is what to make. In the second category its better to start with a map of the future and refine it with user feedback. However often users don't know what they want and then you need folks like Jobs.
- redshirtrob 8y ago
  Perhaps I should have quoted the specific point I was responding to: > You have to be a user of your own product to really make it good. That doesn't say anything about product or market. It's a very general statement that I happen to find rather dangerous in terms of hiring/employment practices. I tossed out pacemakers as a very obvious counter-example. I could come up with plenty of others--some from my own work experience. I did try to couch the comment a bit. I do think there's value in being a user of your own product. I do not think it's a necessary precondition though. And treating it as such unnecessarily constrains the candidate pool. That's the point I was trying to make.
  - batteryhorse 8y ago
    It's like being a chef but not wanting to eat the food you cook. For example, a lot of people want their salmon cooked extremely well done, when you as the chef, think this is wrong, but this is what the customer wants, so you do it anyway, but you no longer care about it.
Razengan 8y ago
I didn’t mean that you should only hire candidates who are existing users of your product. Haven’t you ever had moments, while using something, where you encountered some stupid behavior that made you go, “Do the people who make this thing ever use it themselves??” This is related to the concept of qualia [0], and sentiments like “Be the change you want to see in the world.” or “Necessity is the mother of invention.” Yes: someone without a heart condition will not be able to fully appreciate all the nuances of a pacemaker. Of course that’s not to say they can’t contribute to the development and production of pacemakers. That’d be absurd. But unless the thing you make is actually used by you, you will only [need to] perform within the specifications of your job, get paid and get out. You won’t be able to identify any deficiencies that aren’t immediately obvious, and unless user feedback impacts your profits, you may see no reason to improve something. It’ll be /r/NotMyJob. But if you’re an active user of your own product, you’ll have a much higher chance of noticing annoyances and shortcommings and fix them before waiting for user feedback to bubble up through the corporate chain to influence a change in the product. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia
sbr464 8y ago
I feel like it could apply to pacemakers as well. I feel like certain qualities, features, annoyances, subtle benefits, etc could only be experienced if you actually went through having one installed, dealt with it every day, etc.

mlthoughts2018 8y ago

I work for a company that makes a very popular social app and I don’t use the app whatsoever, and refuse even to download early adopter versions to test. Sometimes people at work give me crap for this. But they know my engineering contributions are among the best in the company, so what can they say? It’s foolish to disqualify people for this. Imagine saying men cannot ever work for a team that delivers feminine hygiene products, or a woman can never work for a product team that makes male health products.

testb 8y ago
Hm the advice to be a user would apply for startup founders right? I definitely wouldn't expect engineers to be active users especially in a more mature company with PMs.
- mlthoughts2018 8y ago
  Why founders? It seems like that will be true for some businesses and not others. Case by case basis.
  - testb 8y ago
    True, best not to make generalizations.
  - nostrademons 8y ago
    It's true in any business where the primary risk is understanding what to build and not how to build it. That's not all businesses - for things like medical devices, avionics, high-performance computing infrastructure, self-driving cars, etc. it's very clear what the product needs to do, and not all that clear how to do it. But those businesses usually require deep industry knowledge and advanced technical education (in a field other than software), and you're slotting into an existing market structure rather than creating a new one. That means the potential market sizes are smaller, the risks are better judged by people with advanced technical degrees, and the effectiveness of capital is less. All those make them a poor fit for YC.
    - mlthoughts2018 8y ago
      Even when the primary risk is that you’ll build the wrong thing, there would be cases where paying a market research firm to compile advice on that topic that balances current customer requests against other things, like forecasts of industry or demographic or supplier or political trends, is a vastly better use of time than having the founders sit and use a product and develop their own idiosyncratic (and likely ignorant) idea of what to improve, or to oscillate between different focus points based on possibly incoherent or inconsistent customer feedback.
      - nostrademons 8y ago
        I have yet to meet a startup for whom hiring a market research firm and depending upon the results in the report gave them useful information that turned into a big opportunity. There's a simple reason for this: if such a report exists, then a big company who actually has money has already hired that market research firm and executed on those results, and that market opportunity is closed.
        8y ago

irq-1 8y ago

Being "a user of your own product" is a cheap proxy for caring about quality.

thecleaner 8y ago

The pacemaker example doesn't resonate with me. Its a very well-posed problem - don't let the patient die. You don't have to be user to understand how to make things better. For things like personal computing its a bit different. Problems are very ill-posed and often the question is what to make. In the second category its better to start with a map of the future and refine it with user feedback. However often users don't know what they want and then you need folks like Jobs.

redshirtrob 8y ago
Perhaps I should have quoted the specific point I was responding to: > You have to be a user of your own product to really make it good. That doesn't say anything about product or market. It's a very general statement that I happen to find rather dangerous in terms of hiring/employment practices. I tossed out pacemakers as a very obvious counter-example. I could come up with plenty of others--some from my own work experience. I did try to couch the comment a bit. I do think there's value in being a user of your own product. I do not think it's a necessary precondition though. And treating it as such unnecessarily constrains the candidate pool. That's the point I was trying to make.
- batteryhorse 8y ago
  It's like being a chef but not wanting to eat the food you cook. For example, a lot of people want their salmon cooked extremely well done, when you as the chef, think this is wrong, but this is what the customer wants, so you do it anyway, but you no longer care about it.

Razengan 8y ago

I didn’t mean that you should only hire candidates who are existing users of your product. Haven’t you ever had moments, while using something, where you encountered some stupid behavior that made you go, “Do the people who make this thing ever use it themselves??” This is related to the concept of qualia [0], and sentiments like “Be the change you want to see in the world.” or “Necessity is the mother of invention.” Yes: someone without a heart condition will not be able to fully appreciate all the nuances of a pacemaker. Of course that’s not to say they can’t contribute to the development and production of pacemakers. That’d be absurd. But unless the thing you make is actually used by you, you will only [need to] perform within the specifications of your job, get paid and get out. You won’t be able to identify any deficiencies that aren’t immediately obvious, and unless user feedback impacts your profits, you may see no reason to improve something. It’ll be /r/NotMyJob. But if you’re an active user of your own product, you’ll have a much higher chance of noticing annoyances and shortcommings and fix them before waiting for user feedback to bubble up through the corporate chain to influence a change in the product. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia

sbr464 8y ago

I feel like it could apply to pacemakers as well. I feel like certain qualities, features, annoyances, subtle benefits, etc could only be experienced if you actually went through having one installed, dealt with it every day, etc.