The Product-Minded Engineer

Chapter 6. Understanding Your Target Audience

We can’t simply ask customers what they need or want. Cognitive biases interfere with our customers’ ability to answer these questions reliably. Instead, we want to listen for needs, pain points, and desires in the context of specific stories.

Teresa Torres, author of Continuous Discovery Habits

The key perspective switch of the product-minded engineer is to build for someone specific. Knowing our customers, we can select complementary feature sets (which we’ll design in detail in Chapter 8) and prioritize the truly needed efforts on requirements such as latency, scalability, and security (Chapter 9).

Tip

Build for someone.

It sounds simple, but in practice doing so requires frequent, active effort, given all the other demands on our attention. Like sea otters, we dive for our food but also come up for breath.

In this chapter, you’ll meet your target audience. For now, I’ll focus on your initial interactions as you interview prospective customers, learn about them, and decide which ones are in your target audience. (In contrast, in Chapter 5, we were iterating on later versions of our product, and we consulted existing users.)

You’ll use that info to build personas (and nonpersonas) that will guide the work of your whole team. These techniques should help you develop a strong vision and get the big decisions right.

Real Users, Not Straw Men

As I mentioned in Chapter 1, real humans have certain universal characteristics—​for example, ...