Twitch founder Emmett Shear on product roadmap disagreements

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, the person who's actually done the work gets to have the opinion. You can have ideas, but they get to make the call. But in the case, you wind up where both people really have talked to the users and both people really have looked at the data and people still disagree as to what we should build, which, by the way, is actually much more rare. Once both people have actually talked to users and actually looked at the data, it's usually relatively easy to get to consensus, but it will come up where people still disagree. I have found it's better when you just have someone who's in charge. At the end of the day, you have someone who's the CEO and everyone agrees this person's judgment will be trusted and you let them make the call. Don't avoid conflict, talk about it, argue about it, but then you have someone who just gets to make the call because anything else leads to just decision making. That's far too slow for a startup.

Yeah, maybe it's because I'm usually the one in charge. I just feel like I don't have a lot of disagreements.

You're a CEO.

Yeah. Largely, I find the situation I'm in, I say one of two things a lot, which is I don't want to argue about it. If we can just test it, and I'm very willing to be surprised on this, I'm probably right. But this isn't getting into my top three important things to worry about today. So let's just see. It's easy to do that when you have more resources to. Let's just see. But I think about Alexis and I over the years and Adam and I over the years at Hipmunk. I think, as Emma pointed out, we very rarely had these philosophical differences over with a product. Sometimes it was timing like, should we build this thing now? Like, what's the prioritization of these things? But we always agreed on general mechanics of what we were doing and why we were doing it. And so the strategy might change, but the actual details were very rarely not emotional. So if those are getting emotional, I think there's probably something else structurally wrong. You might be swimming upstream. That happens a lot. The arguments I've gotten at Reddit over the last year, like when we try to promote, we do cross promotion from mobile web to the app. It just doesn't feel great. It works. It works and we like the numbers going up, but it's not really with the user's best intention in mind all the time. Sometimes it drifts into this, like it's good for the company, but maybe not for the users. And when you're in those situations, that's usually when the disagreements come out and you're not really arguing about the feature anymore. You're arguing about short term or long term or best for the business or best for the users. And then when you beat that and beat that and beat that, eventually you come to a solution that actually feels right. It meets your intuition. You don't feel like you're fighting the technology, you're not fighting the users anymore. Those are usually situations I look out for.