Built for Everybody

Description

  • Through diligent by-the-book user thinking that agile coach told you to do, you've concluded that everyone has the problem and your addressable market is the whole industry/world

Disproof

  • You have specific personas and a description of who’s not your customer

Consequences

  • You might think you’re designing for a safe average but in reality you’ll be making siloed sub-optimisations for contradictory requirements across multiple target demographics, resulting in an incoherant dumpster fire that nobody will buy. No revenue, no customers, no exit
  • Should you ever make it to launch, your messaging, distribution, operationalisation and pretty much everything else will be as incoherent, you’ll torch money and die

Causes

  • Pressure to broaden the scope and 'expand that TAM', buddy
  • Laziness on the behalf of product and design in particular, or more likely a fear of pushing back
  • Prior success and the hubris that makes you think that one-to-many is easy because you did zero-to-one

Approaches

  • The product team needs to drive, not receive, the target market, including calculating viability (with help)
  • If the pressure is coming from outside the product team, find out what that pressure wants and demonstrate how doing this will not get them it