Rob Snyder argues teams should stop designing for abstract markets and personas. Start with one real person and their to-do list. If your product fits their priorities, you've found real demand. Scale from there.
main thing that we do wrong is that we think about people in aggregate. And so we think about markets and niches and abstractions like personas. And none of those things ever actually buy anything, which means we never really are selling anything anybody actually wants. And so what I've found is that basically the only way to build something people want is to focus on a single person and what's on their to-do list. What is on their to-do list determines what they are trying to do, obviously, what they are prioritizing. And if we fit into one person's to-do list, then we look and say, okay, that one person, we're building something they actually want. And that replicates across people. And then once we understand how one person does it and what replicates, we can then zoom out and see the structure, like a broader struc— of demand as it aggregates.
