Emmett Shear: "If you haven’t talked to users… you don’t get to have an opinion about the product.”

You talk to your users first and then you have the ideas about the product. Almost everyone does it in the opposite order. It's called product validation. If you find yourself thinking, I'm going to go talk to my users to validate my product idea, you've gone horribly off the rails. You do it in the other order. You don't talk to users to validate your product ideas. You talk to your users to have your product ideas. And so I just have a rule in general for people who want to have a voice in product design is that they better talk to the users and look at the data too. If you haven't talked to users and you haven't looked at data, you don't get to have an opinion about the product. I'm sorry, like the person who's actually done the work gets to have the opinion. You can have ideas, but they get to make the call.