I am the hunter of invisible game

What the dickens makes your customers tick?

You can think about the jobs they hire your product to do.

You can track how your best customers find you.

You can measure customer acquisition and retention in a simple and meaningful way.

You can see what your customers are doing and interact with them instantly and with context.

The frameworks and tools are all there.

But a great rifle does not make a great hunter.

Hunters need intuition.

Maps and binoculars and books and camouflage will help.

As will years and years of experience.

But it doesn’t guarantee success.

As product managers and designers, our job is predicting the motivations and influencing the reactions of people we’ll never meet.

This is an absurd task.

And so in absurdity we must rely on intuition to build a blissfully simple product that feels revolutionary to all those users who haven’t yet signed up.

Why does it need to feel revolutionary? Because the point, surely, isn’t to retread the steps of others and employ the same old design patterns.

And even if we end up standing on the shoulders of giants, we should at least begin by employing first principles.

You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

Steve Jobs

We are the hunters of invisible game.

With thanks to The Boss for the title of this post