Techniques for bringing Humanity to The Inevitable.
Recently, I began re-reading Kevin Kelly’s 2016 book The Inevitable, which takes an insightful look at twelve technology trends taking hold in today’s world and shaping the future. While reading it this time around, I’m more attuned to the fact that Kelly asserts human behaviors are evolving in reaction to the technologies that are becoming more and more ubiquitous. However, as product managers, we must ensure innovations are developed around people and their needs before all else.
According to Kelly, technology is advancing at a pace faster than most people can understand or fully utilize, and networks are enabling technology to build upon itself with less human intervention or human understanding required. Kelly writes in The Inevitable, “We are morphing so fast that our ability to invent new things outpaces the rate we can civilize them.”
Yet, has technology evolved to become an entity acting separately from its human inventors?
While Kelly’s trends astutely identify a trajectory for progress, and his optimistic vision of the future ranges from pragmatic to truly inspiring, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that technology cannot evolve in a vacuum.
Technologies should advance in the service of unique, individual human needs: to maximize freedom, to foster shared understanding, to optimize the quality of life, and to realize human potential.
At a micro-level, we as product managers must guide our own innovations through the lens of human development, not just of technological or organizational advancement. We need to develop deep understanding of the people who use our products and enable our teams’ actions to be placed within the context of peoples’ common motives. We must ensure empathy for individuals is always a leading factor behind our decisions.
Although many techniques could facilitate better understanding of people’s needs and behaviors relative to a technology or trend, a particularly useful strategy is marrying realistic user personas with specific jobs to be done for which your solution can add unique value.
User personas describe an archetype of a person who is targeted as either a desirable user of your product or a current user of your product. Personas represent cohorts of people that share common characteristics, behaviors, and motives. They are expressions of data, typically formed by combining quantitative feedback (hard numbers) with qualitative feedback (responses to open-ended questions). Yet, their outcomes can be very personal and there are many ways to create effective personas.
An analysis of customer jobs to be done asks managers to take their personas a step further, to define and prioritize key needs that each persona must satisfy, along with the various ways that they are meeting that need. Identifying a customer’s jobs to be done involves taking into account all of their alternatives and fosters an understanding about how your products could be developed to fulfill the same or a similar need. They also provide benchmarks for your product to objectively improve upon those alternatives and add insight into a person’s full experience.
For Harvard Professor Clayton Christensen, jobs to be done “allows me to go to that second level.” According to Christensen in a 2016 HBR podcast, a product “can’t provide experiences unless [it] understands the fundamental job...[and acts] kind of like a North Star, and my innovators in my company can do all of this work, sometimes our of the line of sight of executives. But if you have that North Star, the job to be done, they will collectively do a better job in innovating.”
Kevin Kelly poses a call to action in The Inevitable:
We are marching inexorably toward connecting all humans and all machines into a global matrix. This matrix is not an artifact, but a process. Our new supernetwork is a standing wave of change that steadily spills forward new arrangements of our needs and desires. The specifics...hinge on the crosswinds of individual chance and fortune...We stand at this moment at the Beginning. The Beginning, of course, is just beginning.
Confronting the inevitable must be done through the lens of human advancement. It is a moral imperative for product managers to form their own vision with human empathy at the forefront, innovating on behalf people’s needs before the needs of technology. Thoughtful personas, coupled with a clear understanding of each persona’s ‘job to be done’ enable product managers to put people ahead of technology.