This is why user research is often seen as a threat. It’s easy for an executive to get their way by claiming it’s something the “users want” based on a couple of leading conversations, safe in the knowledge that nobody can call them on it. https://twitter.com/inkblurt/status/1356591462541127681

The sales team are great at feeding these sorts of snippets to the CEO. “Our clients keep asking for X, but the product team seem unable to deliver”.

Customers may very well be asking for these features, but this doesn’t mean that they want them. Often they just want to shut a sales conversation down (because they have actual work to do) so will come up wit a few excuses.

It often feels safer to say not yet, rather than no.

It may also be the case that the sales team are leading the conversation e.g. “would you sing up if we had X” quickly becomes “our users are asking for X”.

Quite often customers don’t actually know what they want, until they start using a thing and find it wanting. So a lot of early feedback is simple folks trying to imagine what they think they may want, without really knowing.

The start-up dead pool is littered with the corpses of companies who implemented features existing or prospective clients said they wanted, but then didn’t use.

I remember one executive fighting with me over a particular feature that they absolutely had to have because customers wanted it, only to criticise the same feature as stupid and pointless in a round of usability testing a few months later.

It’s really easy for executives to come up with bad ideas quickly. It takes a lot more effort and political capitol to combat such ideas. As such, many bad ideas make it through to production because the gatekeepers (designers and PMs) can only field so much.

One way to deal with this flow of new ideas is to have some mechanism to validate them. Either through research, through prototyping, or through launching and see what happens.

However all these things take time, which means that ideas start to back up, exerts get frustrated why things are taking so long, and teams start to get a reputation for being slow and unhelpful.

Especially if the exec thinks “I’ve already told you how to fix this, so why do we need to do research or test. Just build the darned thing”

This is especially problematic if the execs never get to own their own bad ideas. Essentially nobody ever runs the numbers to say that “the last 5 things you told us to build have had no effect, so we need to think about commissioning work differently”