Developers and non-technical founders fail at the same step: both skip the research and go straight to building the thing they already pictured. One writes it themselves and the other pays someone to write it, and the result is the same product nobody asked for.

The interesting part is what each group believes about the other. Technical people go looking for someone to handle the marketing and the customers. Non-technical people go looking for someone to handle the technical side. Both are trying to hand off the half they are not confident about. Only one of those halves is hard to learn.

Why engineers land here

Not because they are careless. Because nobody taught them this part, and at some point everyone assumed they already knew it.

Engineers get mentored while they are junior, and very quickly that drops off. Once you are senior it becomes collaborative rather than mentored, which is fine for the system, and now you are a senior engineer and who is helping you figure this stuff out? Nobody, because you are supposed to know everything.

So you get people who have been product adjacent for years and have never had the chance to learn what a product manager actually does. They know how to get an app out the door, they know the technical side cold, and they are scared of users, and they have no idea what happens to a problem before the work reaches them.

Building also feels like progress in a way research does not. Moving buttons around the screen feels like important work. If you never checked that anyone wants that button, it is not.

The honest version of the gap is this: it is the thinking, not the doing. You can learn to write code. Nobody told you that you also have to think about this other thing at the same time as writing it.

There is a second habit underneath it. Engineers like to feel like lone wolves. They can be, and what they build usually is not as good.

Why non-technical founders land here

They believe the gap is technical, so they spend their effort and money on getting something built. They go to an agency or hire a student with an idea and no research, and it is a waste of their money and a frustrating experience for everyone.

The gap was never technical. Nobody can build the right thing from a description of a solution.

The step both of them skip

Finding out whether a meaningful problem exists at all, and whether people care enough about it to change what they currently do.

It is one step and it is boring to describe: talk to five to seven people who have the problem, about the problem, without describing your solution. That is it. It is also the step that decides whether everything after it is worth doing.

Engineers have an extra hurdle here and I say it plainly in class: almost every engineer I have spoken with wants to find some way of not doing the interviews. It is very common among technical people, and the way through is to do three of them, recorded, with a script.

There is one more engineer-specific trap. Building first and then showing people feels efficient, and it backfires, because users get distracted by what is in front of them. They stop telling you about their life and start reacting to your screens. It is better to validate the concept than to validate with the product.

Which gap is worth closing

If you are not technical, you do not have to learn to code. You can hire, and with a written strategy you can hire well.

If you are technical, the product half is the one that makes you harder to replace, especially now that the typing is the part getting automated. What I teach is essentially what a junior product manager knows, plus the things product managers only pick up on the job: how to talk to engineers, how to run the process, how to decide. Nobody handed me that either.

Both audiences are in the same course for exactly this reason. The non-technical people bring the questions engineers stopped asking, and the engineers know how software actually gets built. It works better than either group alone.

Keep reading

How to Talk to Users When You're a Developer, and Find It Deeply Uncomfortable

App Idea vs. App Strategy: What's the Difference and Why It Matters

What Happens When You Hire a Developer Without a Strategy

Learn this with me

From Passion to Product is my free six-week live course and it is taught to both groups in the same room. No coding is required to take it, and knowing how to code does not let you skip anything in it.

The students in a cohort are engineers, designers, product managers and people from outside tech entirely, which is the point: the step everyone is failing at is the same one.

I teach the same material to engineering teams as well, as a one day workshop or a longer program.

Join the waitlist, get the workbook, or look at the team programs.