Building great products with total immersion
You can’t build a great product from the outside looking in. You have to live it.
Talk about your product constantly. Use it every single day. Make it part of your routine. When you wake up, when you eat lunch, when you’re waiting in line. Use it until it feels natural.
Great product builders are obsessed. They think about edge cases in the shower. They notice tiny friction points that others miss. They see possibilities everywhere.
Start from 10 000 meter.
What problem are you really solving? Who cares? Why does it matter?
Get crystal clear on the big picture.
Then zoom way in.
How does this button feel? What happens when the network is slow? Where do users get confused? What delights them?
Switch between these views constantly. Macro to micro and back again. The magic happens in this dance between altitude and detail.
Most people build products they don’t actually use. They rely on user research and data dashboards. That’s not enough.
You need to feel the pain yourself. You need to experience the joy yourself. You need to know your product so intimately that you can predict what users will do before they do it.
Live it. Breathe it. Become your product’s biggest user and harshest critic.
That’s how great products get built.
