You are nothing like your users

You are nothing like the user. You are nothing like them in ways that will bias the way you think about what's good and bad in your product in ways that you can't necessarily recognize.

A product that you and I use that we've been using for years isn't actually the product that we're building for other people. Like a power user who's using a product has... There's so much history and there's so much informed knowledge on how that product... for that product to actually create a great experience for you that if you were to go and create a new Gmail account and look at YouTube today, I guarantee you it's a completely different and significantly worse experience.

It baffles me the number of PMs who never go through their products and go through the onboarding flow. Because we're all in this state of using the product. But actually, that first step where I don't have the product, what does that look like?

Building consumer products is very hard. I think people think it's easy, because each of us is a consumer. We think of ourselves as a good user, we think of our friends as users, we think of our family as users. And we say, 'Well, if we just build it for ourselves and for our family and friends...' But man, it's hard. It takes a long time to get things right.

When you have that kind of a melting pot of ethnicities, religions, media consumption and kind of socioeconomic status in one place, you learn a lot of them because in school you're mixing up with everyone... we work on mobile devices, people make an assumption that one phone number plus one device tied to one person. And growing up in Trinidad, I just knew that wasn't true.

Maya is encouraging her product team members at Spotify/Anchor to create their own podcasts to better understand user needs. "Their podcast" refers to each team member's individual podcast.

I really don't think that you can build the right things. If they talk to users all the time, they see the data, but all of them, once they finally start doing their podcast, they're like, I get it. Something clicked and now I feel like I really understand what they need.