When it comes to product discovery, two distinct skills often get mixed up:
- Conducting user research
- Actually understanding users
To understand users, you need to do research. But you can do a lot of research without ever understanding your users.
Most articles and courses can only teach you the mechanics of user research: theories, techniques, tools, and generic tips. What they can’t teach you is how to interpret and synthesize raw signals into insights. This will always require practice and context-specific thinking.
Here’s a common trap I see product teams falling into:
They spend 95% of their time planning research, collecting data, and creating presentations — leaving only 5% to understand what it all means.
They believe they’ve followed all the best practices from experts and world-class companies, so there should be a clear answer on what to do next. But as we all know, that’s rarely the case.
So what do they do next? More research → More data → More conflicting signals → More methods → Less time to interpret the results → Repeat.
The irony is that even when the answer is crystal clear, they often choose to ignore it. Why? Because the answer is so obvious from just talking to five users that all the extra effort seems like a waste. And when the leadership inevitably says, “Alright, enough discovery. Time to ship,” teams rush to take the results at face value and build a proverbial faster horse.
Some people might think, “Yeah, it’s better to launch an MVP and iterate.”
But that’s missing the point.
This isn’t about which discovery method is superior. Whether you’re running interviews, testing MVPs, or analyzing A/B tests — the core idea remains: Can you understand the signals you’ve collected?
This crucial interpretation step often gets skipped because it can’t be reduced to a checklist. The misguided notion that user research must be “objective” also kills meaningful discussions, with any skepticism getting twisted into “So you don’t care about users?”
After years in product, I begin to think that some people don’t really care about understanding users. They care about being seen as “user centric.” Their fancy research projects are purely performative, created only to add artifacts to their portfolios and to look smart.
In contrast, builders who truly care about users rarely brag about their research methods — because that isn’t the goal. Real user insights can flow in from everywhere: Twitter replies, competitor forums, Youtube comments, support tickets, or random everyday conversations. The actual process of understanding users is non-linear, scattered, and happens mostly inside your brain as you internalize all the pieces you’ve gathered.
That might not be sexy enough for a blog post, but it is the secret to building a great product.
