The more I work closely with startups, the more I realize how easily have easily they built a notion of ‘elastic user’ into their product execution.
Especially those startups where founding teams have a strong geeky background or very strong design background (yes! the two extremes meet with some elasticity)
What is “Elastic User”?
One of the biggest challenge for any startup/small business is to understand the users – who they are, what they do, what product attributes will work for them etc. While you may not have a lot of money to conduct market research (most of the times, it’s not even worth it), the next best alternative is to make certain assumptions about the user and build product/features accordingly.
And if you belong to one of those two extremes (i.e. the founding team is either too geeky or design focused), one gets lost in the so called ‘self-referential design’, i.e.designer or developer may unconsciously enforce their own mental models on the product design which may be very different from that of the target user population (wikipedia).
The Elastic User - Stretch and Bend to suit one's need
Basically, the elastic user is stretched to meet developer/designer’s implementation strategy (related: The Story of Hammer and Nail (and Startups)), a sort of comfort zone approach used by many founders to justify what they are doing.
Instead of bending the software to meet user demand, the user is stretched, pulled (in all directions) to meet the demand of the software!
So how do you kill the ‘elastic user’?
Best that you can do is to be-aware of the fact that you are working with an ‘elastic user’ in mind – most of the startups aren’t even aware of this. Infact, many of them do not even have a clear user definition in mind (typical process is to first implement, figure out the technology part and once you are done with the product, figure out how to market!).
What has been your experience? Did you ever realize the ‘elastic user’ that you are working with?
[A lot of the above will be discussed at the Product Strategy Workshop on Saturday. A few seats are left, so do get in touch with ashish at pluggd.in or sameer.shisodia at slicedbread.in ]
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I feel that, indian users are not stretched, but forced to use the product through illogical and meaningless advertisements.
Stretching is always beneficial to a certain point. Anything about a certain point makes the elasticity to go away.
But only few understands to create products according to the users, and only few know the means to stretch the user without causing discomfort.
An efficient product head is one:
Who creates product that have value to its users and also one who knows to stretch the users into using their product without causing discomfort.
An example of a good products would be:
orkut , Facebook.
An example of stretching the users, would be , Facebook appz.
Absolutely agree with you!
In my previous company, our CEO/founder was an absolute geek and he would act on “one user” input. I used to roll out new features every 3rd day!.
The product was really good, but it was over engineered and ultimately became real heavy to use(with all the bells and whistles)- needed powerful machines to run the java and users started dropping off..
But the task of figuring out the elastic user is a tricky one. On one hand you need to differentiate yourself and so are keep to implement and on the other hand you have limited resources
But, did u ever think of CEO prespective? Rather I would have done light weight solutions based on user preferences..Not everything at a whole.. Just what he wants..
I have also observed that “Don’t do what users say, do what they do.”
One of the most typical users in a startup are either the founders or the management team at the helm. It take quite some time for startups to come out of their founding team’s influence and start serving real customers. Its key to identify these real users as early on as possible.
yes sir, it’s all crappy. Being independent seems to be a crime in this land. This is not protecting the nation. Instead, making enthusiastic freelancers lose their opportunities to earn descent income. I was actually going to pay for an SEO training course from a guy in Australia. Today onwards, the transactions are not possible, right?