The most foundational principle of product development is “users are lazy”. No one cares about what you’re doing. They (we!) only care if something makes our lives better. And users are lazy at every step of the way: discovering, learning, remembering, using…no one cares! Users are lazy! It’s good to remember because we all fall in love with what we are building, and we expect the world to care. But, sadly, it doesn’t - we have to go where the users are.
I had an experience recently that made me wonder if that’s going to become true for people, too. Someone reached out to me to connect about some ideas relating to AI - cool, I think about this stuff a lot, seems reasonable. But I looked at this person’s resume and they were really all consulting, not building.
Makers are interesting. This is going to be an age of makers, since the tools are so powerful now. Thinking about something is now much closer to making it than it ever has been - and making and exploring are so much more valuable than just thinking. You learn more by trying things. I learned this when I was studying math. It’s easy to look at a problem and think you know what the proof is, or that you know how to solve it. But the proof, as they say, is in the doing - often what seemed like an obvious proof would take me half a day to finish. I learned not to trust my intuition on whether I really understood something, I had to put my hands on it to know that I understood it.
And more importantly, what that consultant was offering was…well, much less valuable to me, and I’m lazy too. If I want consultant-grade thinking about something, well, I can get it from any number of models for prices that are effectively free. And what I get is vastly more convenient - I don’t have to have the 10 minutes of polite get to know you chat, I don’t have to wait for them, I don’t have to politely shape and modify the output…I can ask for research, go off and do something else, come back, take what I want, reshape it, be rude/abrupt etc. Heck, I can probably get what I need in less than the 10 minutes of “get to know you”.
This is a problem if your “product” is that kind of thought. Users are lazy. If there is a better way, they will absolutely find and use it.
This can feel scary but it doesn’t have to. The secret is we now have these absolutely incredible tools that will help us explore. Interestingly, though, I think a lot of people are “waiting for permission” to use them though. Just yesterday, a very senior technical person, one of the smartest, savviest technologists I know, said they “changed jobs at exactly the wrong time” and felt out of step with AI. Which is kind of absurd on many levels but particularly because using the current generation of LLMs is roughly as hard to learn to do as … having a conversation. Sure, you might not be as good at it as some folks, but you can ask it for help, and you can ask it to research and explore.
This is a time for makers mindset. Explore, converse, try…don’t be afraid of making messes, and don’t wait for permission. Users are lazy … for you (and me!) too.
I have been waiting for AI to take a idea and create the file for 3D printing. That idea may be a rough drawing with AI creating a good model from it and then creating the print file. Or it could be some other input with annotations for exact dimensions to create the object and print file. As I am lazy and not interested in learning how to use a 3D printer, I would send the field off to a print shop to make the object in a certain material for a price. The AI should be able to determine the best way to orient and support the object for the printer to ensure that the build is going to work rather than fail. Artisanal objects could have a new golden age.