The Secret Roadmap: Why the Best Products Are Built on Conviction, Not User Requests

Advocates: Daniel Lereya (monday.com)

Monday.com's CPO takes a more nuanced stance: listen to all feedback, but be highly selective about which feedback drives product decisions.

"Not every customer feedback is the feedback that will drive you to the right place."

Daniel Lereya

▶ 00:57:38

The insight here is that customers are excellent at describing their problems but unreliable at prescribing solutions. And some feedback is situational — a customer is frustrated right now about a specific workflow — while the product needs to be built for patterns, not incidents.

Concrete example: At monday.com, the product team synthesizes feedback into patterns rather than responding to individual requests. A hundred customers asking for a specific feature might actually be revealing a deeper unmet need that requires a different solution than what any individual customer described.

Advocates: Mihika Kapoor (Figma)

Figma's approach bridges the gap: start with strong conviction, but use prototyping (not user surveys) as your validation mechanism.

"We lean heavily into designing and prototyping even before a project gets a green light. If you and your team do your job correctly, what does the world look like?"

Mihika Kapoor

▶ 00:00:16

The distinction is crucial: they're not asking users "what should we build?" They're building something based on their vision and then putting it in front of users to see how they react. This is vision-driven development validated through exposure, not user-driven development.

Concrete example: Figma Slides was prototyped and pressure-tested at a company all-hands before the team committed to a full launch. The vision came from the team, not from user requests. But the conviction to ship was validated by the internal prototype's success in a real-world situation.

Advocates: Peter Deng (OpenAI, Instagram, Uber), Kayvon Beykpour (Twitter)

Some product leaders argue that frameworks themselves are insufficient — what ultimately matters is taste.

"It wasn't anything that any other company couldn't have done, but it was that product taste that Kevin and Mike had and conviction that there's a certain sort of vibe, if you will, that people wanted, and building that and iterating."

Peter Dengon Lenny's Podcast (using Instagram as an example of vision-driven product development)

Kayvon Beykpour from Twitter adds that the answer isn't any one framework — it's having enough people with good judgment who can synthesize all inputs.

"Sometimes those things are aligned and sometimes they're not, and the answer isn't any one framework. Sometimes it's just good old-fashioned judgment and product taste."

Kayvon Beykpouron Lenny's Podcast (on balancing frameworks with judgment in product decisions)

Concrete example: Instagram's success wasn't driven by user research or competitive analysis. It was driven by the founders' taste — an aesthetic sensibility about how photo sharing should feel. No amount of user interviews would have produced the specific combination of filters, square format, and social mechanics that made Instagram iconic.