Don’t let grief stop you from iterating your product
By: Avi Siegel
Tags: User Experience, Product Development, Product Design, Product Management, Startup

You created a feature with a specific set of use cases in mind, and you solved for those! Good job you, pats on the back all around. Mission accomplished.

But wait… A user hits a snag. They have revealed that the product — your product — isn’t perfect. They are questioning why a feature works a certain way, or they can’t figure out how to use it in the first place. They write into support and proclaim “this is broken”, “this is terrible”, or “this makes no sense”.

Now the stages of grief begin.

Denial

Immediately you think:

“There’s no problem here.” “This feature is working as intended.” “They’re doing it wrong.” “They don’t get it.”

In the first stage of grief, you’re denying that there’s any issue to begin with. You solved the problem you set out to solve. You did the user research. You scoped appropriately, performed user testing, even rolled out a beta before the wider release.

You checked all the boxes — how can anything be wrong?

What To Do: Don’t be so quick to proclaim victory, and don’t get defensive when someone comes to you with a problem. After all, solving problems is your job! If you deny even the possibility that something is imperfect, you’ll never be able to see through the mass of feedback to understand what needs to change.

Anger

Okay, you’re not denying it anymore — there indeed seems to be an issue here. But…

“Why would anyone want to do it that way?” “Who on earth would think that that button would do that?” “What did they think was going to happen if they selected that option?”

These questions, and plenty more, are the ones you ask yourself when you’re in the Anger stage. Your users are trying to do things that just don’t make sense, and they’re failing. Or even worse, they’re breaking the system, causing edge-casey bugs to rear their ugly heads.

Who are they to say that it’s not working correctly? Who are they to question the design and testing skills of your team? Who are they to make such a bold declaration as “the product team just doesn’t get it” — no, you don’t get it!

When you find yourself here — stop, breathe, and think. Then, revel in the situation. Your users are indeed interested in the functionality you have given them! That’s a great accomplishment! They just… want to use your feature slightly differently, or get a little bit more out of the product.

What To Do: Take that information and run with it. Don’t get mad, get glad (as the old commercials told us)! Talk to the users. Understand what they’re trying to accomplish. Consider tweaking the feature to solve the current use cases differently, or expanding functionality to solve more use cases entirely. Take the opportunity to learn, instead of being frustrating that people “just don’t get it”.

Bargaining

You’re no longer angry — good. Now you start to try to convince the user (or more likely, a fictional version of the user in your head) that the solution which you have provided them is the right solution.

“But if they just do it this other way, it does exactly what they want.” “Well, it technically works, as long as you do x/y/z first.” “Maybe we can just convince them that this is really what they need.” “But we had to do it this way because of this other thing.” “Maybe if we don’t do anything, the users will just get used to it. Big Tech changes things all the time, sometimes with an angry response from their user base, and they stick with their decisions despite the backlash!”

At the Bargaining stage, you’ve realized that indeed the feature isn’t perfect. But, you’re trying to justify the decisions you made. The system works in particular ways that the end-users don’t understand. If they were to understand, they’d be back in action, using the feature just as you intended!

What To Do: You need to get to a point where you grasp the fact that your users are not meant to understand the inner workings of your product. You can’t bargain with them (whether in your head with the idea of them, or on an actual call with them). You can’t convince them that what they are trying to do is wrong, and the right way is sitting in front of them, in the form of the feature you’ve provided to them.

You have to be able to stand in their shoes, see the world as they see it, and empathize with their needs. Remember, you are not the user — they are.

Depression

You finally start to fully comprehend the issue. You’re not trying to convince anyone anymore. But the problem can’t so easily be solved.

“If only I thought through it from this angle the first time around, we wouldn’t be in this mess.” “It’s tied too tightly to the rest of the product, it’s too hard to change it now.” “It’s too big of a problem. We’ll never have the resources to fix it.”

All the information settles in. You see the problem in the product, and you understand the pain you’ve caused your users. Why did you do it that way? Where did your thinking steer you wrong? Can anything really be done about it now?

The answer to the first two questions is “because you didn’t have all the information, learning happens over time, and iteration is normal”. The answer to the last question is, of course, “yes”! There’s always something that can be done, even if not immediately.

What To Do: Get yourself out of the funk. At this stage, don’t stress about roadmaps and resources and the myriad of problems you face. Just hunker down and focus on this one thing. How could your feature be better, despite all the surrounding issues? In an ideal world, knowing what you know now, what could this feature look like? Worry about the bigger problems later; allow yourself to calm down and think in broad strokes about just the specific issue at hand.

Acceptance

This is where you want to be! The other stages of grief aren’t doing you any favors — they’re just holding you back.

You finally truly get it. You’ve accepted the fact that iteration is natural, people want different things, and there are always more problems to solve. You see those problems, you feel for the customer, and you want to deliver something better. You understand that the real world might get in your way, but you’re okay with it.

Now it’s time for your team to shine!

What To Do: Start thinking about a potential future state with the help of your users and colleagues. A lot of this can happen as informal conversations at this stage — Slack, watercooler chats, one-on-ones, etc. You’re trying to get an idea for what the future might look like — you don’t need to solve everything quite yet.

Lean on the customer-facing team to understand the issues as they see it. Get on more calls with customers to further validate those issues. See what sales has uncovered about how competitors are solving similar problems. Think through a new possible UX with the designers. Talk about technical feasibility with the engineers.

In short — tap into the brainpower of everyone near you to lock in on a better end-state for your feature or product. In doing so, you’ll naturally get buy-in, and get everyone on board with a path forward. Remember, it’s not about convincing them, it’s about working with them to build and iterate on the solution — you don’t have to convince someone to believe in something they played a part in creating!