Users lie in research. Not maliciously. They simply cannot see past their current workflows. This piece from Sidebar names the core trap: smart, articulate users give confident, detailed answers about what they need, and those answers are wrong because users know their day, not your roadmap.
The argument is not that user research is useless. It is that most teams ask the wrong questions and then treat the answers as a specification. The piece distinguishes between research that validates a present reality and research that opens future product space. That distinction determines whether you build a faster horse or something that matters.
Worth reading in full for the tactical framing on how to redesign interview questions so you extract behavior and constraint data instead of feature requests. The methodology is practical and the failure mode it describes is common enough that most product teams will recognize themselves in it.
[READ ORIGINAL →]