Every Product Has Two Users, And You’re Probably Ignoring One

The person who buys your product and the person who uses it are often completely different people, and designing for only one of them is why so many products quietly fail. I spent the first three years of my design career making a specific, systematic mistake. I was designing for the people sitting in front of my product. The ones typing into the interface, clicking buttons, navigating flows. I thought about their mental models, their frustrations, their goals. I tested with them. I iterated based on their