At some point, every product person becomes a terrible first-time user of their own product. They still click around, run the flows, catch the bugs. But somewhere along the way, they lose the ability to be lost.
The people who build products and the people who use them are working from completely different maps of the same territory. Most of the time, no one is measuring the distance between them.
The mapmaker
A mapmaker knows their map better than anyone. Every road, every contour line, every carefully chosen symbol. They drew it. They know what everything means. And that’s the problem.
They stop recognising their assumptions as assumptions.
The mapmaker is our metaphor for the product person. Years inside the same product means years of accumulated familiarity. Every corner, every edge case, every design decision and the three-hour meeting behind it. It all makes perfect sense, because they built the logic it's standing on. Of course, it's intuitive. Of course, it's obvious.
And from that place, important decisions get made, ones involving time, money, and trust. Many times, more than admitted, guided largely by what gets called a "strong gut feeling." Which is often just familiarity wearing a nicer outfit.
It feels like instinct, but it’s actually infrastructure. Years of experience, emotion, and context your users don’t have.
The map isn’t wrong. It’s just not the territory your users are in.
“Individuals who make informed decisions in their daily lives have a strategy and a sense for evidence-gathering. But there are organizations that will invest 20,000 person hours and several million dollars based on intuition, or whatever data is closest to hand.”
Erika Hall
The computer metaphor
Think of your brain like a computer, but one that never clears its cache. Every time you work on your product, you're storing something: a decision made, a problem solved, maybe a feeling of pride.
Your brain is also a processor, but unlike a computer, it always arrives with history. You don’t get to go into settings and delete those imprints. New information doesn't get evaluated on its own terms. It gets routed through everything that came before, such as past decisions, half-remembered conversations, and instincts you've long stopped naming.
This is the illusion of expertise: we confuse familiarity with understanding. The more we know something, the harder it is to see it clearly.
The IKEA effect
There’s another layer to this. The more effort you put into something, even a piece of cheap furniture, the more you convince yourself it’s good.
Building creates attachment. Because you don’t just own the thing, you made it.
In product, this shows up everywhere. Features that took months feel important, even when users don’t notice them. Design decisions that sparked long debates feel significant, even when they’re invisible to anyone outside the room.
This is justification bias. It’s hard to let go of something you built. But it’s also a quiet tax on clear thinking.
This doesn’t mean you’re irrational. It means you’re human. It also means your gut isn’t drawing from a neutral source. It’s drawing from everything you’ve put into the product.
And that’s not the same as reality. Especially not the reality on the other side of the screen.
The traveller
The traveller arrives with no map.
No history with the territory. No memory of how the roads were laid or why. No attachment to the landmarks. Just a new place and a vague goal.
Over time, that changes. The traveller becomes a local. That’s expected. But there’s a window at the beginning where everything is unfamiliar, and every decision carries weight. For product people, that window closed a long time ago.
When a new user arrives, they’re not excited. They’re cautious. Is this the right thing? What if I mess something up? Is this worth my time? That’s the territory they’re navigating.
A few well-documented biases can help us become better mapmakers when considered.
Uncertainty avoidance. When the next step isn’t clear, people stop. Ambiguity doesn’t create curiosity under pressure. It creates abandonment. Every “I’m not sure what this does” is a moment where leaving becomes the safer option.
The framing effect. The same information, presented differently, leads to different decisions. “90% success rate” feels different from “1 in 10 fail.” “Start your free trial” is not the same experience as “Enter your payment details.” The data is identical. The experience isn’t.
Status quo bias. Defaults are powerful. Users don’t choose them. They accept them. That makes them a design decision. And an ethical one.
Two mental models, one product
So here we are. The product person carries an overloaded, over-familiar mental model. The user carries an incomplete, emotionally charged one. The product exists in the space between, and most of the time, nobody is actively measuring that gap.
The distance between builder and user is rarely a failure of empathy or intelligence. It's a structural consequence of the building process itself. The people closest to the decisions are the furthest from experiencing the product fresh.
And here's the part worth sitting with: you can't think your way out of this. Trying harder to imagine the user's perspective is not a methodology. It's a guess with good intentions. The gap doesn't close through imagination. Here's what does: Evidence.
Back to the territory
So what do you do, knowing your cache is full and you can't unknow your beloved territory?
You look for new data. Not opinions, not hunches, but actual evidence.
And something's worth stressing. Research isn't the enemy of good instincts. It's what gives good instincts something real to stand on.
This doesn't mean redrawing your map from scratch every six weeks. It means building the habit of checking. Asking questions, gathering signals, and staying genuinely open to the possibility that the territory has shifted, or that it was never quite what you thought.
“As long as you treat research as a special, inessential activity, you will never find time for it. When you embed it into how your team makes decisions as a matter of course, you'll wonder how you ever got along without it.”
Erika Hall
This isn't about silencing the gut feeling. It's about giving it better things to work with. Fresher data, honest signals, and the occasional look at the ground beneath your feet.
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Filippa Säll
Experience Design
Filippa brings clarity and structure into complex problems. She sharpens interfaces, simplifies choices, and makes sure the product feels effortless to use.
