People Are People (And Other Product Lessons From Depeche Mode)

Whenever I get into long conversations about product development or my philosophy around it, I end up talking about three Depeche Mode songs that inadvertently formed the foundation of how I think about product development and organizational design.

Sure, they were influential to me as a teenager, but they also explained things I spent 20 years learning the hard way. Teenage Kelsey would probably be surprised that his love of Depeche Mode ended up shaping how I think about teams, design, and why good intentions sometimes create the worst outcomes.

People Are The Same Everywhere

Despite what we hear most, many times when products fail, it's not because of a feature or a subscription model. Those things are critically important, but usually what I see is that the creator of the product failed to make a connection with the people that are actually using the product or the people that they want to use the product.

We convince ourselves that the user is a definition living in a persona, someone fundamentally different from us. We build elaborate experiences without ever really thinking about what this person wants. Not the persona, but the person. This might sound like splitting hairs, but it's the difference between a user's experience versus user experience. One is something you practice. The other is something someone actually goes through.

That's what Depeche Mode was getting at in their 1984 song People Are People. We all have insecurities, doubts, and concerns. The CEO using your enterprise software has the same fundamental needs as the intern using your consumer app. Don't make me feel stupid. Don't waste my time. Don't make me work harder than necessary.

Design for the real humans using your product, not personas. Your edge cases are someone's everyday experience. The problem isn't that users "don't get it." It's that you might not get them.

It’s Not Easy Walking In Someone Else’s Shoes

When you talk to people in the business or product world about customers, they'll often talk about empathy: walk a mile in their shoes, understand your customer, feel their pain.

Depeche Mode's Walking In My Shoes reveals something about empathy that we miss: The breakthrough isn't achieving perfect empathy. It's accepting that you can't.

You can't actually walk in someone else's shoes. You'll "stumble in their footsteps" because you don't have their muscle memory, their scars. We observe people using our products and think we understand their experience. We do customer interviews and believe we've captured their reality. But we're tourists in their world, taking pictures of landmarks while missing the actual landscape.

Once you accept that limitation, you can do something more useful: design for forgiveness. Build systems that adapt to different realities rather than assuming one. Create multiple paths to the same outcome. Design for recovery from mistakes, not prevention of them.

When I stopped trying to understand users perfectly and started accepting I couldn't, everything changed. Instead of building what I thought they needed, I built systems flexible enough to become what they needed.

Your Decisions Count More Than You Think

In 1983, Depeche Mode wrote a song about capitalism that contains a small element explaining why company cultures and products succeed or fail.

It sounds simple, but everything counts. Not just the big decisions. Your mission statement, the reorgs, the pivots. The micro-interactions. The forgotten promises. The unreturned emails. The casual dismissals.

It starts with what you believe. That drives what you value. Values drive behaviors, and behaviors drive the choices you make and produce the artifacts. The artifacts might be employee culture. They may be products. But if you believe my first two principles about everything being driven by people and human nature, this falls right in line.

Even teams with perfect processes fail because they didn't understand the people. Every ignored suggestion in a meeting, every time someone's contribution goes unacknowledged, every small violation of stated values all compound. Except instead of building wealth, they build resentment.

But it works both internally for the people building the product and externally for the people using the product. Every choice, good or bad, compounds.

It's not your features that create loyalty. It's the tiny details. The loading message that said "Brewing fresh opportunities" instead of "Please wait." The email that remembered your name. The error message that apologized sincerely. Everything counts in large amounts.

Still Playing

These three principles have turned into questions I ask myself constantly:

• Am I treating them as different when they're really the same? That's the People Are People check. Most of the time, we overcomplicate because we assume our users are some other species. They're not.

• Am I pretending to understand something I can only approximate? That's the Walking in My Shoes check. Confidence about what users want is usually a warning sign. Design for flexibility, not certainty.

• What small things am I ignoring that are actually everything? That's the Everything Counts check. They're where culture and product quality actually live.

These questions have saved me from more bad decisions than any formal training ever did.

Wisdom From Unexpected Spaces

To whoever introduced me to Depeche Mode at Reagan High School: you probably thought you were just sharing a band. Turns out you were handing me a design philosophy I'd spend twenty years figuring out.

The Depeche Mode principles work because they're not trying to be principles. They're just observations about being human. People are people. None of us really understand each other. Everything counts.