Stop Jumping on Every Tech Trend—Real Innovation Always Puts Users First

The tech industry is at the forefront of cutting-edge innovation. Everywhere you turn, someone's talking about disruption, transformation, or unlocking new possibilities – but the truth is, not every new tech trend aligns with actual user needs. And as product managers, we would do well to remember that the innovation should always serve the customer, not the trend.

Last week, I was invited to share my experiences of leading product at companies working with emerging technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and the new iteration of the internet focussed on data ownership (web3) on a Product People webinar. Using a few examples from my career, I argued for ignoring the hype and focussing on solving real user needs – aligned, of course, to business objectives – when introducing AI or web3 into the product.

Understanding the temptation

Of course, it's tempting to jump on the bandwagon. After all, if everyone is hyped up about something, shouting about how it's going to change the world, that energy can be contagious. Even more so in the tech sector, where we're all afraid of missing out on the next big thing. So whether it's accepting crypto or integrating AI tools, there's often pressure – from consumers, from leaders, from investors, hell, even from ourselves – to "do something with the trend".

But here's the catch – just because we have access to a new technology doesn't mean it makes sense for our users. A cautionary example is the way businesses have been introducing AI chatbots. Sure, you can now say that you're AI-powered, but how is the experience for your typical user? Far too often, poorly executed chatbots frustrate users rather than helping. Instead of enhancing their interaction with your product, it can lead to friction as they struggle to get access to human support agents. In other words, adding AI just for the sake of it can end up alienating the very users it's meant to serve.

It's not all about the tech

This tends to happen because we get so caught up in the possibilities of the technology that we forget the most important thing, what problem are we solving? This is especially relevant when we talk about driving adoption of new technologies.

I was once on a panel with a woman who'd been an early adopter of Bitcoin and blockchain-based currencies more generally, and she drew a comparison with the success of Skype and no one caring about Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP). The underlying technology is secondary. Its main purpose is helping you achieve your goals quickly and easily. Skype helped connect you to relatives across the world without paying exorbitant fees, that's the value.

The other interesting thing to highlight from my fellow panellist's observation is that, of course, it benefits from hindsight. We know (as we knew then) what problems Skype was solving, but we didn't know at the time whether the Skype protocol would win over the other variations of protocols being developed. I must admit that I don't know the history in detail, but I would hazard a guess that user experience had something to do with Skype's ultimate success.

In the same way, blockchain is just the facilitator[1]. Of course, there are significant advantages in terms of security and permanence, but ultimately, it's about the problem it's solving for users. And right now, it's lacking on the user experience side, though we have made great strides in improving this. I'm personally a firm believer that blockchain, crypto, NFTs, and especially AI do add value, but my overarching point is that we as product managers need to look past the technology and solve for users.

Uncovering the "why"

As such, when it comes to our users, we need to get to know them so well that we can anticipate their needs and build solutions without worrying about the underlying technology. There's the often-quoted Henry Ford statement that if he had asked user what they wanted, they would've said a faster horse. While it's unlikely that he actually said this, not the least because he didn't actually invent the car, the quote conveys an important point about the user need state to (a) get somewhere faster and (b) to be able to afford it. Ford's invention, therefore, becomes the solution to a very specific problem – getting from point A to point B more efficiently.

Therefore, it's always a good idea to take a step back and ask a simple question: why? Why are we adding [insert feature here]? If you can't answer in a way that addresses a key business objective, whether that's increased revenue, improved retention, better engagement, or whatever else, through a better customer experience, it's time to reconsider. It's easy to get caught up in the hype and think that blockchain or AI or some other new technology is the magical silver bullet solution, but you can't lose sight of what you're trying to achieve – both as a business and as the product with the customer top-of-mind.

The benefits of web3 and AI

So what benefits are there in web3 and AI? Of course, we haven't yet reached the mass adoption of, say, Skype circa 2013, and it remains to be seen whether we will from a consumer side. From the consumer side, there's a disconnect between the promise (store of value) and the reality (speculation) of crypto, as well as the promise (owning IP) as well as the reality (again, speculation) of NFTs – so while the technology is innovative, the why hasn’t been fully addressed, at least not for consumers. But blockchain is already being used in government and business applications. Estonian and American government bodies, for example, are using the KSI blockchain for protecting privacy and security. Governments and big companies store value in bitcoin.

And then when we think about AI, it's more of the same. Maybe we haven't quite identified the overarching why of consumer AI, though in my personal opinion, it's just a matter of time before mass adoption for the simplification of mundane tasks (my mother regularly uses DeepL to check her English, neurodiverse acquaintances swear by ChatGPT for tackling simple emails that would otherwise take hours, etc). From a business perspective, however, AI is already embedded into our meeting software, into collaboration tools, and even into the core of software development through tools like GitHub Copilot, with more use cases added daily.

Knowing when to pivot

A few years ago, I was working with a company that encountered this very problem – it failed to find product market fit among consumers, but found it for businesses. This was a mission-driven crypto startup focussed on bringing Bitcoin to emerging markets as a hedge against inflation. We gamified the experience, rewarding users with small amounts of bitcoin for engaging with the platform. On paper, this seemed like a great way to build user engagement, but the reality was that this didn't support our business goals long term.

Given the market and the industry, we had to do everything by the book – complying with regulation, receiving the necessary licenses, partnering with banks and authorities. This was not without its challenges, often financial. It quickly became apparent that our target audience wasn't able to sustain our growth ambitions, and while target users were using us to earn bitcoin, we weren't seeing enough traction in terms of transactions to make any money off the exchange.

Now, I was young, a bit naïve, and so committed to the mission as central to the product – in other words, the technology and the mission became inextricably entwined for me – that I left when the CEO decided to pivot, leveraging all our banking relationships and licenses to actually improve the experience of transferring money to more complicated regions using blockchain rails and our user-friendly UI. But with the wisdom of hindsight, I can admit that this use case actually solves a problem and adds value for users, and, from a business perspective, it's a clever repackaging of our existing tech and partner stack to solve a different problem for a different set of users. These new users don't care that the money transfers are cheap and convenient because of blockchain, they just care that they're cheap, secure, and get the funds to a heavily regulated market compliantly.

When technology becomes the solution to a problem that doesn't exist

But it doesn't always work that way. Sometimes, we want to work the technology into the solution so much that the problem we're solving for users is forgotten. In another company I worked for, the founding mission was the ability to register Certificates of Authenticity for physical artworks on the blockchain as a permanent record, which matters to artists who want to track provenance. Blockchain was seen as a solution to the question of permanence, as well as security.

The issue was adoption – this is an issue for the art world generally, why there isn't a single database of Certificates of Authenticity is that each artist, gallery, museum or whatever it may be issues their own, which makes it difficult to track and authenticate. So while there was a use case, the same issue pursued the startup, because in order for these Certificates to continue to exist as intended to, they needed to be transferred alongside the artwork. This was then complicated by the emergence of NFTs and our company's entry into the space, because NFTs were intended, first and foremost, to serve as proof of ownership in and of themselves – you own the NFT, therefore you own the underlying art, and any transactions are visible on the blockchain, therefore establishing provenance.

However, instead of doubling down on the use case and pursuing the vision of establishing an immutable repository of Certificates, we focussed on the technology, and tried to certify NFTs alongside physical works. The logic being that NFTs can be faked, because it's easy to make an NFT with an underlying image that isn't your artwork – though, of course, NFTs track which address created the artwork, so the artists for whom this matters can prove or disprove authorship anyway.

So how does this all reflect on the problem we were trying to solve? Well, the issue is that the decisions we were making (pursuing NFTs in parallel to certification) were contradicting the why of what we were doing (establishing authenticity of certification). And, of course, the big one – we were solving a very niche problem in a very complicated way, which prevented us from driving adoption by focussing on simplifying user needs. The main takeaway being, of course, that before getting too carried away with how to build the solution, determine whether the problem being solved matches your business objectives.

Build or buy?

To top it all off, there's the additional consideration of whether to build the solution yourself or to delegate the work to a third party. This becomes especially relevant when it concerns AI, because ownership of the underlying data model is a competitive advantage. In my current organisation, we have a number of products that are introducing AI-powered solutions that address specific user need states, such as manual and labour-intensive purchase invoicing. This kind of repetitive process with clear parameters is ripe for AI automation.

Why AI? Because it needs to account for nuance in business operations, which is why attempting to address it with rule-based processing is not sufficient. But this kind of solution comes with additional considerations of tradeoffs (time-to-market versus long-term value, as well as who builds it and who handles the legal questions like data processing), all within the context of the breakneck pace of AI.

In Silverbucket, the product I am currently working on, there are many areas in which we can improve usability through AI, both internally and customer-facing. The important thing is to recognise what is actually relevant for us – for example, there's no need for us to screen "easy" customer service queries trained on our knowledge base, because we don't typically get any queries that don't require engineering. This then paves the way for a more comprehensive question of how to build AI assistants for our customers, because a simple AI chatbot for the sake of it is unnecessary.

The main question that we need to answer when we think about how our solution addresses user needs is, how do we facilitate the user's intended result in the easiest way possible? As you can see, that last question doesn't say anything about AI – but in our day and age, this can very well end up being the answer, which is something that we're therefore obligated to explore as a potential (but not only) solution.

Conclusion

The main takeaway is that companies need to solve real pain points, and the technology is just there as a facilitator. If we use it correctly, our users benefit; if we don't, we risk alienating them. The only thing we can really rely on is continuous discovery – watching users, speaking to them, looking at product analytics, exploring their need states, and understanding how to solve their problems, and this can be with or without web3, blockchain, AI or whatever new technology appears on the horizon.

[1] I do want to sound a note of caution here, because AI is a bit of a different beast, the inputs do matter, because they can replicate existing inequalities or spread misinformation, but that's somewhat of a different conversation.