I already talked about mental maps as a way to structurally learn a project.
What I recently realized is that some things feel like they help you understand a project but they actually don’t help reinforcing the mental map, and one of them can be demos.
Watching a demo of a product might not give you an actual understanding of what the product is and does. It gives you superficial information that you don’t crystallize into knowledge.
I think this is fine when you’re judging products from a surface level. But it gets messy fast, especially if you subconsciously imply that watching that demo was enough for you to learn.
The problem with watching demos
Let me clear this up with an example. Let’s say you’re developing a new feature, like a way to connect items in a to-do list. The feature is complete and you’re watching whoever created it walk you through it.
It might be easy to understand when the feature is small, but once features start to become more complex and intertwined with other parts of the product, you’re not getting enough time to properly understand what is going on.
You end up surfing the information, like skimming titles in an article, but you’re not actually distilling it into knowledge.
You think you understand the product, but you don’t.
And that can be a problem because you’re slowly losing touch of what the product is and does. You’re not gaining knowledge of the product as a whole, interconnected entity across your company.
It’s easy to consider a feature done by watching someone presenting it. But since you’re not understanding the breadth of that feature, you’re not understanding the upsides and the downsides.
You’re seeing the pitch, and trusting that that is the complete experience customers will have. But a demo is usually done in a short time (5-30 minutes).
The demo checks a box that you asked for some work and the work is done, but it doesn’t really translate into you understanding how it was done actually and how that will translate into complexity for customers or benefits for customers.
It’s up to the pitch to show this, but there’s rarely enough time to go that deep.
Gaps & Benefits
I think this is relevant because the more you understand the product (and the more you know about your customers) then you can see the gaps more clearly and more easily.
Whereas if you’re only navigating the product on a surface level, you’re not getting that much information and you’re trusting the demo, but without fully understanding the implications.
Of course, getting so deep into understanding each feature is not scalable.
It’s not something that a CEO can do for all the features.
But you can pick your battles, as well as you can ask other people to pick them, as long as you trust their taste and their knowledge about the product and if they can be honest and candid about the problems of every workflow.
Going Deeper
How do you get to truly understand what’s being done and what are the implications for the future for your product? I think there are various ways where you can achieve a better, deeper understanding of a feature.
Option 1: Ask questions.
This is the simpler one. Ask lots of questions.
The demo should not be silent. If it’s silent and you’re not asking questions, it’s likely that you’re abiding by that information, you’re trusting blindly and you’re not questioning the assumptions that have been made to make that feature real.
You’re assuming that it was perfect. And maybe it is. But what you want is understanding, and to get to that understanding you need to question.
Asking a lot of questions is a good way to trigger understanding and start distilling some of that knowledge.
Asking questions alone will help to bridge that gap. Maybe you won’t get that full understanding, but you will understand a couple of things more.
You also don’t need to be highly technical to ask questions.
You can start with open-ended questions like: why did we do it this way? What other ways did we evaluate? Those will give you hints on the process that led to the feature you’re seeing.
You can also ask how much this will cost in the future for us to maintain, what are the downsides, and that will surface other stuff.
Questions like these will unfold a better view of the implications, pros and cons.
Option 2: Demo the thing yourself.
The alternative is to demo it to other people, because that will force you to go through the process of using the product and demoing the product.
A pre-recorded video from someone else doesn’t work. It won’t work because you’re just learning a script. What you want is to go through the feature yourself.
That will let you understand what it is doing and how, and what are the complexities of the feature. It will force you to partly be the customer and face their challenges.
This might also result in a different pitch from the original demo, because you will now be able to see additional strong/weak points.
Don’t surf information, dive into it
I’m sure there are alternatives to this approach, but be aware that distilling information requires focus and understanding. And I think those are critical to direct the product as well as to understand the product.
So pick your battles but go deep. Because surface level won’t get you there.
One of the things that I’m thinking more and more about lately, in the world of AI, is around focus.
What a demo gives you is the opportunity to focus on a problem that people have solved for you, and that is a special and unique opportunity not only to surf, but to dive into the product more.
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