Why I stopped asking "what do users want?"
Early in my career, I thought user research only means asking users what they wanted.
I would talk across users from different of the projects, from teacher, a student trying to complete an exercise (EduTech), a zoo visitor navigating an unfamiliar KiosK (Uni Project) and I would ask some version of the same question: "What would make this better for you?"
They would answer. I would write it down. I would take it back to the team and say, "users want X." We would build X. Sometimes it worked. Often it didn't.
It took me a few years to understand why.
People are very good at describing their current frustrations. They are not good at designing their own solutions.
This is not a criticismm it's just how cognition works. Users have friction. They feel it visually. But the gaps between "this is frustrating" and "this specific feature would fix it" is huge, and it requires a kind of systems thinking that most people don't apply to products they use casually.
When I was researching voice-based chatbots for Melbourne Zoo as part of my master's program, I interviewed 11 participants about their zoo visit experiences. I showed them a video of an existing chatbot and asked for their reactions. What I got back was a mix of insight and wishful thinking. Participants would say things like "I would like to want it to know everything about every animal instantly," which is a user feeling (I want complete information) dressed up as a feature request (complete database).
The insight that actually shaped the design didn't come from any direct answer. It came from noticing that participants with educational agendas (like Students) and families with young children had different expectations than visitors there purely for recreation. One group wanted accuracy and depth. The other wanted interaction and surprise. The same product, different mental models. No participant ever said that explicitly. It the results from listening across many conversations and looking for patterns.
That experience changed how I discover product
The question I stopped asking: "What do you want?", instead…
"Walk me through the last time you tried to do this. What happened?" This questions is for actual behavior, not imagined behavior. People remember specific moments more accurately than they describe general preferences.
"What did you do when it didn't work?" The workaround is often more revealing than the complaint. A teacher who screenshotted a lesson plan and sent it over WhatsApp because the platform's sharing function was too slow is one of the example.
"What situations make you lose your motivation?" Asking about failure conditions opens the things that hidden. It's a faster way to understan the core values than asking what they want.
Data confirms. Research explains.
I have worked in environments where the instinct is to solve every product question with a dashboard. Track the metric, see the number go up or down, make a decision. And data is essential, but data tells you that something is happening. It doesn't tell you why.
The PM's job isn't to give users what they ask for
Henry Ford's famous quote: if he had asked people what they wanted, they would have asked for a faster horse. The point isn't that users are wrong. The point is that users live inside their current mental model, and a useful product sometimes requires expanding that model rather than optimizing within it.
The PM's job is to balance the user's frustration and system's constraints. And I believe that requires listening. Not to listen the answers, but to what's behind the answer.
