The hardest part of doing customer research is knowing who the customer is. I learned this the hard way. <thread>

15 years ago, I was a young(ish) product manager at Adobe. And I was obsessed with blogs. I use to read them, write them, comment on them and recommend them to others. It was proto-social media - a way to reach and engage with others online in an easy, standardized format.

I was also convinced that my company could be a big player in this expanding universe (anyone remember the "blogosphere"?). With the acquisition of Macromedia - and its star products Flash and Dreamweaver - they were already the big daddy of website and online media creation.

My "insight" was that the web was moving to a simpler, more standardized form that will require a new set of tools. Till a couple of years before, if you wanted to share, say recipes, with the world, you needed to create a full-blown website. Now you could just start a blog.

While the format of this new web was standardized, I believed the *form* would still be custom. People would want their blogs to look and feel unique. In 2005 that was very, very hard to do. There was Wordpress, but you needed to hand-modify the PHP and it did not have themes yet

My new product would fill that gap. We would offer bloggers an easy, drag-and-drop interface to create beautiful blogs from a range of easy to use templates. I went about testing this hypothesis.

I met with a sample of Adobe’s core customer base – “creative professionals” who designed and developed websites for a living. Think bearded, Mac-toting hipsters who all want to work at Ideo. They confirmed that all their clients wanted blogs now, and they loved my idea.

This was a customer I felt confident about. I lived in a different country but lived a similar life. I had hand-built my own website, cared about each pixel and worked for a company that valued design perfection. I set about building a prototype.

Thankfully, large companies have approval processes for new products and features. One such process step was getting my user feedback vetted by a director of user research. What I considered a formality turned out to be a nightmare – he red-inked my entire document.

Did my user feedback contain a representative sample of potential customers? On what basis had I selected the group to interview? What characteristics of the group were expected to scale to actual users? Why was the OS distribution so different from that in the overall market?

So I re-did the exercise, this time with my mock-ups. I took help from the user research team to get a more representative sample and started talking to them in small groups. Let’s just say it was educational.

These were regular bloggers with windows laptops. They didn’t talk of “building” their blogs – at most they wanted to “personalize” them. Most of their audience didn’t even come to the website – they used Google Reader or other RSS readers to get a direct feed.

This group didn’t want a $70 software to create beautiful blogs. They wanted Facebook.

These interviews were the first time I could visualize the death of the open web and the rise of platforms. I had totally missed it because I lived in the rarefied world of “creative professionals”. It was classic disruption, and I was blinkered because I didn’t know my customer.

The memory got triggered by a chat in our team today on the value of interviewing the customer. It is by far the most important part of our diligence on potential investments, but I always wonder if I’m speaking to the right people.

Epilogue:My product wasn’t entirely without merit. Wordpress eventually built almost everything I had proposed and created a developer ecosystem that made it a dominant player.But that was not where the puck was going. I learnt this because of a diligent director of user research