“This is exactly what we need”Hearing this from users during one of my recent consultancy engagements means the world to me. It’s why I do what I do. Their satisfaction is the gauge that measures commercial success. Users are the heart of it all.But how did I get to a position to elicit such a strong response? One look at my CV and you see pioneering use of industrial robotics, AI and manufacturing for Fortune 500 companies. Sure, there’s industrial design, automotive, architecture, even art - so where does the user empathy come from? Let’s rewind a little bit. Like many people, the time afforded through the COVID lockdowns gave me pause for thought: As a serial entrepreneur I had fallen into the technology trap - a fantastic place for building more and more tech, but at the cost of finding less and less place for this tech to call a home in the real world. I realised that the privilege of synthesising good products only comes after deep analysis of user needs - it sounds simple, but it’s a discipline to stay the course through repeated experiments and iteration cycles long enough to get those results. And without accountability the operator can fall foul of inherent bias. I had.If the goal of the User Experience/Design Thinking/Human Centred Design/Lean Startup/Customer Development frameworks is increasing objectivity of observations, then we need the option to take a step backwards if we want to see what’s really happening.Fast forward to today, and I have built these frameworks into an interconnected Notion database to make the observation-hypothesis-experiment-validation cycle explicit - from discovery stages through to product delivery - to keep you aware of whether the outcomes remain aligned to the user need.How to finish? With the confidence that you know the user problems inside out, you can assemble the right combination of technology to deliver results. Hence the quote above.