Product development is now a conversation

Lately, I’ve been thinking about how product development is starting to feel more and more like a conversation between the people building the product and the people using it.

As users get more comfortable with technology in general, hours and hours of user testing can sometimes be a waste — especially when you're working with something new, like AI. With new technologies, you can't always rely on old mental models or established usage patterns. When you lean too heavily on the way things have always worked, you risk losing the magic of what the new technology could be.

What I’ve been seeing is, sometimes you have to create something, give it to users, and spark a conversation. You teach them how you’re thinking the product could work — and at the same time, they teach you how they want it to work.

If you lean only on what users expect, you miss out on discovering something truly new. Users can only give feedback based on what they’ve seen before. It’s our job to protect the “magic”, to create space for something unfamiliar and exciting.

It really is like starting a good conversation, you bring an interesting topic, but you have to be open to where it goes, without being too weighed down by what’s come before.