Everything is a Product — Breaking the Illusion of Expertise with Smarter Systems for Real Growth
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🏗️ Frameworks for Everything 🏗️
Takeaways: The User Outcome Connection teaches us that success, whether in product development or personal growth, comes from focusing on the behaviors that drive meaningful change, not just surface-level metrics.
A common mistake in product development is over-relying on vanity metrics like usage or satisfaction scores. These numbers feel good but don’t necessarily indicate whether a product is truly working. Instead, the real measure of success is whether a product is changing behaviors in a way that leads to a meaningful outcome, a principle I call the User Outcome Connection (UoC).
I found this idea so useful that I wrote an entire book about it. And over time, I realized it doesn’t just apply to products, it’s just as important in personal growth. Whether you’re building a feature or improving yourself, outcomes matter more than surface-level metrics.
How It Works in Product: A Weight Loss App Example
Let’s say you’re designing a weight loss app. You might be tempted to track daily logins or user satisfaction ratings, but these don’t actually tell you if the product is delivering results.
Instead, you should focus on:
✅ Defining the real outcome — The goal isn’t just app engagement, it’s helping users lose weight.
✅ Identifying the key behavior changes — Users need to consume fewer calories and burn more.
✅ Ensuring a higher-order benefit — Weight loss leads to better health, which drives long-term app retention because the product is making a real impact.
How It Works in Personal Growth: Becoming a Better Friend
Just like a product team needs to define a meaningful outcome, I’ve learned to do the same in my personal growth.
Take friendships, for example. If I wanted to measure success in a shallow way, I could track:
❌ The number of friends I have
❌ How often I text them
But just like with a product, these aren’t the real outcomes I’m after. Instead, I should focus on:
✅ Defining the real outcome — The goal isn’t just having more friends — it’s building deeper, more meaningful relationships.
✅ Identifying the key behavior changes — I need to reach out more frequently and have deeper conversations that create real connections.
✅ Ensuring a higher-order benefit — Better friendships lead to higher social well-being, which improves my overall happiness and life satisfaction.
Reframing the User Outcome Connection framework for personal life looks like:
Experimentation: Testing Changes in Both Worlds
In product, once we establish the User Outcome Connection, we can experiment with changes to improve results.
- For a weight loss app: We might test new habit-forming features, like daily step goals or meal tracking reminders, to see if they drive actual behavior change.
- For personal growth: I might try experimenting with different ways of connecting, like scheduling monthly deep-dive conversations or sharing meaningful experiences, to see what actually improves my friendships.
The key insight? Just like in product, I can’t assume what works… I have to test it.
Looking at any sort of change through the lens of the User Outcome Connection, one can begin to see whether in product development or personal growth, success isn’t about surface-level metrics. It’s about identifying the right behaviors to drive the right outcomes, and then designing experiments to get there.
- In products, that means moving beyond vanity metrics and focusing on how users change behavior in meaningful ways.
- In life, that means defining what success actually looks like, so we’re not just tracking meaningless numbers but creating real impact.
Once you start applying the User Outcome Connection everywhere, you’ll see the world differently. You’ll stop focusing on what looks good on the surface and start measuring what actually drives meaningful change.
🗺️ Behavioral Blueprints 🗺️
Takeaway: The Dunning-Kruger Effect causes people to overestimate their expertise early on, only to face a harsh reality check, but smart design, through guided education and controlled falls, can help them transition from false confidence to real competence more smoothly.
Overconfidence is baked into human nature. As early primates, we needed it to venture out, take risks, and push boundaries. It has fueled some of history’s greatest inventors and continues to drive ambition today, whether in entrepreneurship, creative pursuits, or even something as mundane as believing we’re better drivers than average. But while overconfidence can be a force for growth, it also blinds us to our own ignorance. Respecting this cognitive bias is key to building better products.
One of the most well-documented patterns of overconfidence is the Dunning-Kruger Effect. Across domains, from learning a new skill to interacting with generative AI, we see a predictable cycle:
- The Peak of Overconfidence — A beginner learns just enough to feel like an expert.
- The Fall into the Trough of Despair — A moment of failure or new complexity shatters their illusion of mastery.
- The Path to True Expertise — They either quit or begin the long, humbling journey toward real competence.
I’ve seen this effect play out in countless ways. Users of chat-based AI systems, for example, often assume they’ve mastered prompts after a few interactions, only to be caught off guard when results become inconsistent. Event planners, after one successful gig, may assume they’ve cracked the formula, skipping the deep analysis needed to replicate success. Across fields, the pattern is the same: premature confidence, disillusionment, and (for those who persist) eventual mastery.
How to Design for the Dunning-Kruger Effect
Great products don’t just acknowledge human biases, they design around them. Instead of letting users crash into the wall of disillusionment, we can build systems that guide them through their learning curve in two key ways:
🔹 Guided Education: Keep users engaged by gradually expanding their understanding, introducing complexity in stages rather than overwhelming them upfront.
🔹 Controlled Falls: Instead of letting users fail catastrophically, create low-risk opportunities for them to recognize their limitations in a way that fosters growth. Think of tutorial levels in games or sandbox environments in software, places where mistakes are expected, safe, and instructive.
By designing for the Dunning-Kruger Effect, we help users navigate from false confidence to real competence, building not just better products, but more capable people.
