The "Mom Test": asking good questions when everyone is lying to you

> Another piece of reality is that sometimes people don't know how/what to look for in search engines, or they're so overwhelmed with work they don't have the time/patience to look for it, and they need the solution to be placed in front of them.

A lot of these are failures of workplaces/managers/whatever, in my opinion. Hell, a bunch of them are specifically that we've decided everybody has to be their own secretary, because computers, but nobody gives much thought to empowering workers with better tools and training that really focus on their needs for that specific role we've decided they must fulfill in addition to their actual job.

A whole lot of the ones I've heard could be rephrased as "I wish my company had a secretary for every five or ten of us, to do these couple of tasks that we all hate, find distracting, and are kinda bad at since it's only a small part of our jobs, all of which leads to actual problems X, Y and Z, wasting time & materials and pissing me off besides, all of which would go away if we had a secretary who could focus on this stuff".

> Those scenarios you mention could be venting off in their free time when they have the time to ruminate and think about their pains.

Oh, I hope I didn't give the impression I get, like, mad when this happens. I mostly just think it's funny, and illustrative of how very much one must take that kind of input with a large grain of salt. It is sometimes kinda sad, mostly for the reasons above.

They usually seem really serious about it. I dunno. I definitely don't go out of my way to bring what I do into a conversation or to focus on it if it comes up, because most folks find computers incredibly boring, and nothing I do with them is particularly interesting. I do tend to encourage people to talk about what they do, mostly out of habit from product "discovery" work. It's often, like, plumbers or whoever, not other software-adjacent folks, who light up and tell me about this great idea that'd love to have available, if they find out what I do... and it's almost always something that already exists, and not even in a "you could just do that with Excel and email" sort of way, but purpose-built apps for what they want.

Not that you shouldn't ever enter an existing market, it's just that I always get a little kick out of how they claim this app would be super-useful and I should build it, but they've been a couple taps away from having what they want for, potentially, years. It demonstrates the gap between "you should build this, I would use it, it would be very helpful!" and how potential customers actually behave.