The Importance of User-Centered Design with Gabrielle Guthrie, Moxxly

Episode Transcription

Gabrielle Guthrie:

It's really important to believe that designers and founders can and should care about issues that do not necessarily affect them personally, and the nuance to that, at the same time, it's really important to actually center the people you are designing for or else you end up with not user-centered design, but designer-centered design.

Christian Beck:

This is a Better Product original series on the business impact of product design. I'm Christian.

Anna Eaglin:

And I'm Anna. We're joined by Gabrielle Guthrie, a product designer and co-founder of Moxxly, a hands-free breast pump for women on the move. Quick mention, the company was acquired in 2017, so if you go to Google, you may not find Moxxly in the way that we'll discuss it in this episode. Our conversation with Gabrielle focuses on user-centered design, specifically its importance and how it should impact a founder's process.

Before we go there, let's go back to the genesis of Moxxly.

Gabrielle Guthrie:

So I got my Masters in product design from Stanford in 2014, and Moxxly came out of my thesis project work there. My project partners and I, we set out knowing that we wanted to design products for women because at the time, this was 2013 at the time, 8% of mechanical engineers were female and 12% of industrial designers were female. We were just wondering what would happen if two women were to set out and design products for women. So we started there, and we took this approach of mapping out a woman's life intersecting at these big milestones, and we started interviewing people who were at those different milestones.

So we interviewed pre-teen girls. We interviewed people who just got married. We interviewed people who were going back to school, and we interviewed this woman named Laura who changed my life.

Christian Beck:

More on that in a minute. One thing to point out, Gabrielle and her project partners didn't start out with a problem or a solution in mind. They started with a person or group of people in mind; women. She dug in from there seeking to understand first. Now, how did Laura change Gabrielle's life?

Gabrielle Guthrie:

Because she talked about what it was like to return to work after being gone from maternity leave, and we wanted to talk about that. We wanted to talk about what it was like for her being a female engineer in this male dominated space, but she just wanted to talk about her breast pump, and so finally we were like, "Okay. Let's talk about your breast pump." And she pulled this thing out of her bad, this black generic bag, and then she just kept pulling these parts out, and it was the first time I had seen a breast pump, and it was a bit shocking, to be honest. We knew that when she was talking about it and she was describing her experience and how important the product was for her, but how at the exact same time, how frustrating it was for her to use it, especially at work, that's when we knew we had a product that we wanted to take a stab at and see if we could redesign an experience around that for Laura and people like Laura.

Anna Eaglin:

Through research and questions, Gabrielle found a problem to solve, and she found someone to solve it for.

Christian Beck:

As I personally dug into Moxxly, not sure how I stumbled upon it since I've never personally been on the hunt for a breast pump, but...

Anna Eaglin:

I have no idea how to respond to that. I mean, why wouldn't you look for a breast pump? Just because you're not the one using it...

Christian Beck:

I just like to keep up with innovations. Even though I have not personally used one, we have had one in the house for many years. I am aware that they are not a joy to use and tote around. I just like to stay up for innovation in the space. Even though we're done having kids, I just want to know that other people have had better options. I just remember being blown away with the human focus of the product because from my viewpoint, breast pumps are almost dehumanized being these clunky machines with a ton of parts, and they're noisy and hard to carry around. With Moxxly, it didn't feel that way. Rather, there was a real human behind the design.

Anna Eaglin:

Which takes us to the focus of this episode. Gabrielle shares the intentionality behind what Christian is saying, the human approach to design.

Gabrielle Guthrie:

Everything we did, we tried to do with a lot of intention, and with users at the core of the experience, we're really obsessed with the experience of the product. So post-grad school, I knew that I wanted to turn this into a thing. I wanted to keep going with it. It kind of got under my skin and I couldn't stop thinking about it. I wanted to see what would happen if I kept going. Through the Stanford network, I met my two co-founders, our CEO, Cara Delser, and our CTO, [inaudible 00:05:10], and Cara and I, especially were always very aligned from the beginning that not only is there a product opportunity here, but there's a really strong brand opportunity here because at the time, again in 2014, just the whole space around motherhood, it seemed to appeal to this notion of women as these soft, care giving moms. Right?

They've become moms and are no longer women. They really focus on the baby and softness and pastel, and that makes sense because it is products for moms who have children, but we really came out of this angle that our users are women. The people who are buying our products are going to be women who happen to be mothers. Right? They're the ones who are going to be buying it. They're the ones who are going to be using it, and so we really wanted to focus in on the women, millennial women, and they always have expectations for their products. They want fewer, better things. They have a high standard of what their product should be, but breast pumps had not risen up to that level yet of the expectations that consumers have, that millennial consumers have about their products.

Christian Beck:

I'm curious about how you come to those conclusions and figure out what direction to take from a physical product designer's perspective, too, and you mentioned brand. How do you take all that and actually make a case for it and figure out what your interest is going to be before anything exists?

Gabrielle Guthrie:

I can boil it down. This is a very long process, and it's always much easier to look at in hindsight, but in terms of the product, starting with the brand, that was a straight, classic, competitive analysis, just looking out at the landscape, going to places where these products are going, to places where these women live, where these women are shopping, where these other products in their wheelhouse, and just looking at what's out there. For us, it was so obvious that it all was around this space. It waws like really soft colors, baby patterns, little duckies, little bunnies, that sort of thing.

In terms of differentiating ourselves, in terms of really speaking to the users, it was very clear to us from the beginning that we can differentiate ourselves in the market in this way. Not only that, but that this is the right thing to do. This is what people really want to see. This is what people are really craving, and we gut check that by talking to so many women. We've spoken to hundreds of women throughout this process to really nail the tone of the brand, to the visuals of the brand and then, of course, the product itself. What are the most important elements to the product? And that came through really in depth user research on our part.

Christian Beck:

I want to ask a kind of nuanced question about the competitive analysis and research part because I know a lot of our listeners are familiar with things like competitive analysis, particularly from, say, a feature parody, [inaudible 00:08:44] features, or from a business background, but you're mentioning user research and brand, and you've mentioned what the product should do. How do you approach research to make sure you're getting more than simply a feature checklist of the things that are missing or things like that, and you're also getting elements about brand?

Gabrielle Guthrie:

In terms of process, user-centered design always starts with articulating your user, articulating who you are designing for and why. It's incredibly important for product development process and for startups, and not only that, but also asking yourself and your team, who is this not designed for? I think that if more teams ask themselves that question, we would have much more inclusively designed world.

I'll give you a story about fast forward to we had already had done all this research, the competitive analysis, all the prototyping, years of prototyping, and finally we had our prototype. We had our first packaging come back, and we brought the packaging and the product to one of our investors, and he opened it, and he was like, "Oh!" It had this magnetic clasp to it, and he's like, "Oh, that magnet. It feels a little strong. Have you thought about, just thinking about my parents and they're aging. Have you thought about how this might be difficult for elderly people to open this?" I love that he's thinking with an inclusive mind because no. The answer was no, I hadn't thought about that at all, but I'm okay with that because our users are new mothers who are going to be mostly in their 20s to 40s. Right?

So I'm okay if a woman in her 70s struggles a little bit with a standard magnetic opening. So just starting with really who is your user, who are you designing for, and who are you not designing for? I think that's really important because design is all about context, and you can't design for a user's context if you cannot define the demographics and the psychographics of your users in a really rich and meaningful way.

Anna Eaglin:

I love this background you're giving. I have a eight week old baby right now, and so my wife is breastfeeding, and so this is our life all the time, everyday. I wash breast pump parts constantly, and to think about a breast pump specifically as something mechanical and functional is not even close to what it means. It's almost this representation of do you have enough to feed your baby, and it can get very emotional, it can get very challenging, especially if you feel like you can't have enough. It's so interesting that you chose motherhood as, when you look at the end-to-end journey of a woman's life that you chose motherhood because it seems to be such fraught. You being able to, like you said, understand the context of the breast pump beyond it's just that functional thing that I have to use to produce is so important, and also it sounds like it influenced everything around the product, like you said, the brand, the pallette, the colors and everything. How do you work and move inside an area like this that is so understood differently and kind of fraught with really strong opinions?

Gabrielle Guthrie:

Like you mentioned, it is such a rich space, and I think that really gave us a lot of energy to get it right and to keep going and understand that every woman we spoke to about their experience, there was commonality for sure. The first year, everyone we spoke to said pumping makes me feel like a cow. Every single person said that. So there was a lot of commonality, but then like you referenced, there's a ton of difference, too, and every single person is going to be different in a way in which they approach this and what it means to them and how they use it, where they use it and what their goals are and what their objectives are, and so yeah, it can feel overwhelming when you take in more and more and more and more data.

For us, again, it was really important to understand the context in which our product was going to live, and so we would go to women's houses and sit on the floor with them in their living room and do pump-alongs, they were called, and talk to them about the importance for them. They're telling us this product is so hard to use. It's painful. It's not intuitive, and yet, I'm going to do it every day, three times a day for 20 to 45 minutes for a year. It's like what? Wow! That is so, so fascinating, the commitment that we saw from women, despite the struggles and the hardships that they went through and their partners went through to support them.

So getting to the bottom of that was through these pump-alongs and sitting on the floor with them while they pumped, going to work with them and going to the pump rooms to understand, okay, what happens right before you start pumping? What is pumping like for you? Are you taking phone calls? Do you have to context mode switch? How does that effect your supply? What happens right afterwards? So one of the tools that we used was the journey that we called boob-to-mouth journey. It was like the journey that the milk itself goes through and then, of course, the emotional layering on top of that that each person has to go through in order to achieve that feat.

Anna Eaglin:

I think we also see that entrepreneurs are solving problems, but oftentimes, it almost seems like they're not real problems, or they're going through it and solving problems for sis-white men or solving problems for rich people. You know what I mean? Solving problems that really aren't a lot of problems, but focusing on this, and as your journey as an entrepreneur, you dug deep into this problem. You spend a lot of time with women. I'm curious, when you see these at a company solving these problems, what are your thoughts about that?

Gabrielle Guthrie:

I have a lot of thoughts about that, and I've been thinking a lot recently, since the resurgence of Black Lives Matter and during the pandemic. I've been thinking a lot about user-centered design and the role that user-centered design plays in actively contributing to the status quo and actively contributing to sexist issues for sure, is what I had been focused on with Moxxly, but racist issues, as well. Right? So with user-centered design, I think that there are two things, specifically, that I've been thinking about recently that is kind of missing from the conversation that I'm seeing more people discussing.

One is what you're saying, is that people solving problems only for themselves. It's really important to believe that designers and founders can and should care about issues that do not necessarily effect them personally, and the nuance to that at the same time, it's really important to actually center the people you are designing for, or else you end up with not user-centered design, but designer-centered design. To unpack that a little bit, I'm not a mom, but when people found out that I had co-founded a company to improve the breast pump experience, the first question I would get, more often then not, was, "Oh, are you a mom?" What's really interesting about this question and the fact that I got it so predictably is that there's this underlying assumption there that I can't care about a social issue that doesn't personally effect me, that people can't care about issues that don't personally effect them.

This is really problematic, especially as you're pointing to, you consider the majority of fortune 500 CEOs and VC-backed entrepreneurs and VCs, so the people, in other words, the people with a lot of product power are white, hetero, sis men, and of course, there's nothing wrong with being a white, hetero, sis man, but the problem is that when the majority of power is held by people who experience life through these internationalities, that's not representative of the richness of the lived human experience. Right? So if we only have people who have those experience, and they're only designing products for themselves, what does that mean? I think the antidote to that comes from John Lewis who said, "If you see something that is not right, not fair, not just, you have a moral obligation to do something about it."

So for me, as a designer, starting a company and designing a product that brought dignified tools to a space for new mothers was my way of doing something about a system that was not supportive of women returning to work after maternity leave. The answer is not only that everyone designs for people other than themselves. At the heart of user-centered design, I was taught it at Stanford as we practiced it at Moxxly, it's this notion of empathy, the idea that you can care about and do something about issues that you see in the world that don't necessarily effect you personally. Right? I will never need to use my own product because I've chose not to have children, and what I think it not talked about, in design circles at least, is what do we really mean by empathy? I think design can look to activism for an answer to this.

I have a friend, Corey Ponder, who is an ally leader. He's a company with impact strategies, and he identifies three different types of empathy. The first type is emotional empathy, which is I feel what you feel. The second type that he identifies is perspective taking empathy. I put myself in your shoes, and then the third type is this compassion empathy. I feel and am compelled to act, and I think I love this framework because it's so helpful to identify the different types of empathy because empathy is this word that gets thrown around a lot, but we don't talk about what do we really mean by that, and how should we be approaching it?

The thing that's missing from the pedagogy of design thinking and user-centered design is the complexity of power dynamics that are introduced when a designer is designing for a user group that they are, themselves, not a part of.

Anna Eaglin:

That's a really, really good point, and that's something that I've been thinking a lot about with this because I totally agree with you. I mean, user-centered designer, in and of itself, it should be focused on the people you're designing for, understanding them from their goals, their perspectives, their aspirations, how they live their live and what they want to do, this whole context around it, but there is this... How do you stop yourself from colonizing this group that you're not a part of and taking their insights? That's something I've always struggled with, especially as a researcher.

I go and I have these deep, deep conversations with people, and then I'm like, "Thanks for the product insights. Now, I'm going to apply them here." It's like, do we have solutions? Is it participatory design? Do we keep them involved in the process? How do we make sure we're not just taking, especially if it's a group we're not a part of?

Gabrielle Guthrie:

In Moxxly's case, the way that we balanced it out was two of our co-founders, Shanti and Cara were both mothers. They were part of the user group, and I was not, and I think that it's important to have both because my role, as someone who's not a mother, was to be able to say, "Let's gather more data. Let's balance this out across all of the perspectives that we're getting," because the other side of it is it's dangerous to say, "This is my perspective. Therefore, I'm able to speak for all women," for instance. Just because you're a woman doesn't mean your experiences are representative of all women, and so certainly having a participatory design, bringing people who are impacted by the design to the table, to the decision making process is really important, and there's few different groups who are rethinking the power dynamics that can present themselves in design thinking, one of which is Creative Reaction Lab, and they've developed this process called equity center community design.

There's something other groups, Equity Meets Design, Design Justice Network, Libratory Design, and so there are models out there that point to the importance of having users who are effected by the designs, bringing them to the decision making process, again, so it's not designer-centered design. It's actually centering the people who are using the product.

Anna Eaglin:

We have talked to lots of entrepreneurs, but no one has really talked about... I mean, obviously, with your D-School background, I think, probably, research, talking to people is a part of you and how you probably move in the world, but I'm really curious. That's a lot of time. That's a lot of time spent. That's a lot of time getting out there. Did you ever feel pressure to just like, "All right. Let's get to market." Were you ever feeling like you had to justify the time? Or did you, yourself, think, "I just want to go start designing at some point." How did you balance that, the amount of time you wanted to spend with people out in the world as opposed to in the lab putting things together?

Gabrielle Guthrie:

Yeah, well, luckily, it's not an either or. You get to one, really feeds into the other and all the research that is put in makes all the prototypes better, and all of the prototypes then go back into the user sessions and makes those conversations better. I didn't see it as, and the team didn't really see it as a tension between talking and doing. It was part of the design process.

We did have investors who had not invested in hardware products before, and were like, "Wow, it's been a year. You guys are shipped yet. You should be on Rev 4 by now right?" So there's definitely... It's why they say hardware's hard. There's definitely iterations that need to go into physical products that take longer than the iterations that go into software products, but we approached it as a slow to go fast. If we get it now because the changes you make later on are much more expensive both in terms of time and in cost. So the time spent doing research, prototyping in the beginning is not actually time wasted. It's actually time invested because then that pays of hugely when you go to market and you that people are going to buy the product. You know it's going to work. You know people are going to love it. It's not just like let's rush, skip over this research stuff, rush to market, and then just hope for the best. Then at that point, you're out hundreds of thousands of dollars, the cost of tooling and all of it.

Yeah, we saw it more of an investment as opposed to just time sunk.

Christian Beck:

So when you say designer-centered design, what do you mean by that?

Gabrielle Guthrie:

When I say designer-centered design, I mean that the design serves the ego of the designer, or the startup, or the founders as opposed to actually serving the needs of users. You can go out to a few people, talk to them and call it user-centered design, and then come back and just make whatever decisions that you want, whatever design looks cool, call it user-centered design. That's really designer-centered design because you are more concerned about your deck, your portfolio, how you come off as opposed to, am I really making a difference here? Am I really making a product that people need? Am I really making a product that people care about? Does this even need to exist in the world? Or is this just a cool thing that I know I can do, so I'm going to do it.

Christian Beck:

I talk about that with designers, as well, and I think the thing that distinguishes design from art is that design serves a purpose or it's meant to be used by people, which sort of means that you have to make compromises, concessions, listen to people react to what other people need and not just the things that you want to put on the canvas. Getting back to a question Anna asked, too, how do you balance the whole idea, or the battle between when is enough research versus when do you need more research? Is there a moment or a way that you can build your judgment to know when enough is enough when you go to market? How do you draw that line?

Gabrielle Guthrie:

You're going to hate this answer because it's just so boring. You need a Gantt chart, and you need phased approaches, and you need gating factors because yeah, of course, you could always do more design. There are millions of mothers I haven't spoken to, and at some point, you do have to cut it off. Every single one of them is going to have a different story and could affect the outcome of the design in a different way, but it's a really boring answer, which is just phased approaches.

You need the structure. You have to build up the structure that you can then play within, and so it's really important when you're trying to make something that nobody's ever made before. When you're trying to do something that nobody's ever done before, you can't predict exactly how long it's going to take. You can't predict how long you'll need for an Aha Moment, but you do have the realities of deadlines and a runway, which probably is very short and getting shorter by the day if you're a startup, and to be honest, this took us a while to figure out. You just need to build up the structure, and within that structure, make sure that you have room for experimentation. You have room for failure. You have room for research. You have room for iteration, and pad it. Give yourself buffer time because there's nothing more demoralizing for a team to have a really tight deadline that you're constantly missing.

Christian Beck:

Yeah. It's not a boring answer, I don't think. It may be boring because it gets away from the emotionally side of design, I suppose, but look, if there's a Gantt chart involved, that means business is happening. That's always good. I feel like, too, you have to remember that if you're solving people's problems, you can sit there and try to design for perfection and never take something to market for years and years and years and think is it better to have something out there that's helping people now, or withhold that from people for years so that you can get it right? It makes a lot of sense, and I think even if you think the faith approach or Gantt chart answer is boring, I think it's important for people to know that behind all of this, the things that you're describing, a lot of the empathy and a lot of the user-centered design, there has to be process and structure and a frame to what you're doing to make sure you are actually getting something out, as well.

Gabrielle Guthrie:

Yeah, and it helps you and the team know where you stand. Like, "Okay, is now the time to diverge or are we in convergence right now?" I think the other part of that that helps is being clear. Founders, designers are visionaries. They want the coolest, biggest, best thing, and using that as your motivating factor, but then what is that tomorrow version of that and focusing on getting that, people call it the MVP, getting the MVP out and using that to gain market traction, to build brand awareness, to improve the landscape from where it is now while you continue to build towards that dream and future.

That is not a failure, right? Putting something out there that you see some flaws in that no one else will notice, that's not a failure.

Anna Eaglin:

Awesome. This is so great, such a good conversation. I'm really curious. What's next for you?

Gabrielle Guthrie:

That's what I'm very curious about, as well. After we sold the company, I've been taking what I call a sabbatical because it's been really important for me. We didn't get into it today, but we could maybe have me on another time, and we can chat about the work culture, especially in Silicon Valley, which is the only startup culture that I know, but it was important for me to do real self care, like actual founder self care beyond the Instagram bubble bath self care and take time off to really reconnect with myself and begin to answer that question. What is worth working on because really, the only thing we can't get back is our time.

So I've been thinking about that a lot lately, and I'm finally at a place where I'm excited to reconnect with my original mission around Moxxly in a different space, which is how do we design for real human bodies at the intersection of design, hardware, AI systems because we're at a place now in design, in technology that we're building the systems that everything else is going to be built and designed upon. We need to get it right now so it is diverse, it is inclusive, and it is representative of the real human populations and lived experiences. That's what I'm really excited about. That's what I want to work on next, to continue to work on.

Christian Beck:

So we've had Gabrielle Guthrie write for the Better Product community, so if you haven't read her article, read that, but now you're heard her unique perspective on user-centered design for a really unique product with Moxxly. That was fantastic. Now we're going to pull out a few of the things. This may be a longer B Block than normal because I think Anna and I really enjoyed and got a lot out of this and want to sort of focus some of the things that came out for people how they can apply it to their work.

Anna Eaglin:

I mean, I think the deep research that she did to really... She started out not with a problem, or not with a solution, but she went all the way back to a person, to a group of people, and then she dug into those people and wanted to understand them deeply. Then from there, it's like, then I discovered a problem, and I validated the problem, and we talked about the problem, and then I did a solution. So she went very, very people-focused, which is a different route, as an entrepreneur, that we've heard other people take. I just think it's worth talking about that, the amount of time she spent with people to build this empathy, to be a non-mom building a product for moms.

Obviously, she had to achieve a level of understanding and empathy, and then how that research continued constantly, forever. I really like that thing she said about yes, we had a Gantt chart and we built phases, but we built space in those phases for exploration, creativity, inspiration and failure. So we still had to follow a timeline, but it's like we made sure we padded the timeline to give us that creativity. It's almost like the best combination. I don't know. I like that a lot as a philosophy.

Christian Beck:

But I had picked up on that, too because she had prefaced that by saying this is going to be a great answer or exciting answer or whatever, but I actually feel like... I don't know. This could just be my interpretation of when people writing medium articles about inclusivity and empathy or something. What I think a lot of them lack is actually the practical translation of it. At the end, when you're building something, it's okay to say that now we build this in a Gantt chart, or now we need a project timeline. Those things are okay, and so I actually thought it was okay that she brought it that level.

[inaudible 00:35:01] our listeners to understand that this isn't just some fluffy idea of empathy [inaudible 00:35:07]. This is what it is, and then here's the reality of bringing all of that into something, into a process that brings something to market, and she did so successfully.

Anna Eaglin:

Yeah. I agree. Like she said, you can have this deadline that you keep missing and you keep missing, but you're not setting yourself up for success. Yeah, if you build that creativity, inspiration, failure, buffer time into that plan, it also shows intention, intentionality, as well. Yes we a have a plan. We have a Gantt chart. We know when we want to be ready, but we have built in time for whatever, design thinking exercises, or going out and doing more research and validation and just giving you that flexibility and openness to have those conversations and do that research.

Christian Beck:

Yeah, the other part, too, and I'll try to articulate this because it's still in my head and has been since we talked about empathy and inclusivity and talking about how, I think, product people need to step outside of their selves to design for other people. I was thinking, one of the sort of negative sides of that has historically been white males designing for other people their version of it, and then failing. I would say, maybe, even the breast pump as it is, I don't know who designed it, but it was clearly not designed with a human-centered approach, or if it was, it was designed by somebody who didn't spend a lot of time figuring out what person was going through. I think it's pretty obviously when you look it. It is not like a tool that anybody wants to be using.

So where I'm getting with that is, especially in 2020, as a lot of people are trying to figure out what does it mean to have empathy or all that, it's not just having the team that you're working with be diverse because you can still do that and still miss the mark. It's about building up the methods of human and user-centered designs so that, in any context, you are being other-centered in what you're doing and not just a version of what you think the other person needs. It's actually forcing you to look at other people and get more knowledge about what their world is like before you start designing or building a product.

Anna Eaglin:

Yeah, and I think that we've talked about this in other ways in other shows, but the idea of you don't just understand, "Okay. It's time for you to pump." What is that like? It's more of what does it mean to pump? How does this fit into your mom-hood? So then, it's like, you don't just understand the functional requirements of what the person needs to do, but you understand them aspirationally and contextually, and I think that empathy leads you to internalize that person, and that person and their experience becomes part of your designer judgment or your product intuition, however you want to call that thing.

Christian Beck:

I think that, especially as someone who's a designer, and it's hard for me sometimes to slow down and do research just because I get very excited by problems, but this really got me reflecting even on some of my own negative behaviors with that, and I kept thinking about how she was telling the story of Moxxly and the research and sitting there with mothers on what she was calling "pump-alongs", I just kept getting this air of patience from her. So she tells it with a lot of patience, and I was thinking about myself, thinking I get very impatient. I just want to go get something out there, and I'm realizing now that's a very negative trait when you're designing because that means that you are just glossing over, or you could easily do what I've done in the past.

I'm like, "All right. I need to talk to four people. Cool." Talk to four people, got their notes down, synthesize them, and let's go. She's advocating this... I don't know if slow is the right word, but it's almost like patient, take the time. Even the way she was talking about it felt very patient and thoughtful, and so I wanted to highlight that part coming from somebody who also struggles with impatience for people to think that I hope that sense got into people, thinking that be patient as you're talking to people. Dig deeper when you think that you've got it. Dig a little bit deeper, and there's so much more under the surface that you can uncover before you start going to build something.

Anna Eaglin:

Yeah. Go sit on their floor while they pump.

Christian Beck:

Maybe that's the new mantra. Go sit on their floor.

Anna Eaglin:

I think it's a certain kind of research to solve a certain kind of problem, to build a certain kind of product. I think there are still those products that people put in the world and it's like they have experienced the issue so acutely that they're like, "I know what it is. Let's just get it filled." But I think if you're going to tackle something that is so messy and complex or if you're going to get in a space like that, you have to dig a little deeper. You do have to go sit on people's floors a little bit more. That's not every problem. It's not every solution because she set out to focus on a community, specifically women.

She looked at their entire life, focused on a really critical moment and then dug into those critical moments to say, "What are the problems here?" So it's not the right approach to every problem, but it definitely is to these more emotional, complex, messy situations.

Christian Beck:

One other thing that I kept thinking about was confidence. When you do user-centered design, it really creates confidence, and that short little story she talked about pitching to an investor and they challenged her and say, "Will this work for this type of audience?" She had the confidence to know, "Yes, you're right. It wouldn't work that audience, but I know who I'm designing for, and the intersection of those audiences is pretty small." So I think that acknowledgment to even actually say that, "Yeah, it's not going to work for them," is okay because she had done the research not only just to understand what they were doing, but also to understand what they're not doing, and I thought that's really important because I think, sometimes, we talk to people in our line of work and can see that without doing the research, you can lack confidence, and what happens then, is when you get challenged by an investor or someone on your team, you actually drop everything and go figure it out.

So I could see a different version of that story, where somebody hears that, gets afraid and says, "oh, we need to go research this group of people now and delay everything by a month and a half." You can see how that can start to become an endless cycle of research where at some point, you do need to figure out who are you really targeting and who are you not? And be comfortable with that and have that confidence so that all of your decisions can be made in the right framework and that you can actually get something out and helping people.

Anna Eaglin:

Yeah, I think some of our best clients that we've worked with are people who have very clear understandings of who this is not for because if you can get away from who it's not for, obviously, it helps you build your product. It helps you prioritize really well, but I think it also really helps you a lot in your messaging and your sales enablement, too because you're like, "We're not here to educate people on why this is a problem. We're only going after people who realize that this is a problem."

Christian Beck:

Well, that was a great conversation, and hopefully Anna and I highlighted some things for you, but it might have even sparked other thoughts, which we'd love to hear. Yes, you can always email us at Podcast@InnovateThat.com, but for now, as always, I'm Christian.

Anna Eaglin:

And I'm Anna, and this is Better Product.

Christian Beck:

Product.

Anna Eaglin:

Better Product.