You Are Not the User
How B2B Software Lost Touch With the People Who Do the Work, and How AI Gives Us a Chance to Fix It
A nurse says, “I need to know which patients need my attention.” Support, Customer Success, Product, Design, Engineering, and QA each do competent work on that sentence. Months later the nurse gets a status column and says, “This doesn’t help me decide who to call.” Nobody failed. The system worked as designed, and that is the problem.
B2B software feels clunky because the people who know the work could never build the software, so the industry built a chain of translators between them, and every translation lost something. This fieldbook treats every internal function as a sensor that reports evidence about users, never a stand-in that impersonates them, and gives teams the tools to tell the difference.
AI is weakening the constraint that made the chain necessary. Used well, it shortens the distance between the person doing the work and the software. Used badly, it produces misunderstood software faster.
If you want to know how users use the software, watch users use the software. Everything else is evidence at a distance.
Inside, you will learn how to
- label every claim about users with how strong the evidence is and how close it came to real use;
- tell QA from user acceptance testing, and simulated UAT from the real thing;
- turn complaints into testable hypotheses instead of feature requests;
- watch work instead of collecting opinions about it;
- weigh a workflow by frequency, friction, economics, and clinical consequence, not clicks;
- design when physicians, nurses, billing, buyers, and patients legitimately want different things; and
- use AI to put working alternatives in front of real users instead of writing tickets faster.
Details
- Category
- Product Management / AI Strategy
- Series
- Shahid Shah Fieldbooks
- Publisher
- Intellectual Frontiers Press
- Format
- 7x9.19in fieldbook, 15 chapters
Put this to work
Working fit brief
Decide whether this work fits a real operating problem, partnership, license, or build.
- For
- Practitioners, researchers, founders, and operating leaders.
- What you keep
- A working fit brief you can review, revise, and send.
- What counts as sound
- Answers a named decision
- Separates evidence from assumptions
- Includes the strongest contrary case
- Names missing evidence
- Ends with a test, owner, and date
A promising fit still needs evidence from the intended setting.
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