This week on Product Love, I sat down with Rapha Cohen, Chief Product Officer of Waze. When I started talking about building for user-centric experiences, Rapha introduced the concept for building human-centered experiences. Often times, we want to build for the user’s needs, but Rapha encourages us to think broader than that. We should be solving for society, and sometimes that might not correlate with the user. I do think that’s a more inspiring way to think about the products we build, and how we should approach them. Product managers do have an ethical responsibility with the things that they build.
We also talked about Rapha’s idea and decision framework. He has a method of using concentric circles where an idea gets written by one person, and then you get feedback from one person, the circle enlarges. The next time you pitch it, someone else gives you their feedback. On each iteration, it gets refined and bigger.
Rapha and I talked plenty about feedback (with a bustling community that Waze has — how do they balance all the feedback?) and why experimentation might not be really useful, after all. Listen to the episode above.