Your lived experience is a product superpower

The best product insight often does not come from a spreadsheet or a competitor teardown. It comes from your own life. The experiences that seem unrelated to your job are frequently the exact thing that lets you see a customer problem nobody else on the team can see. Tapping into your full lived experience is a real product advantage, and most teams leave it on the table.

This is something I think about a lot, and there is one story that made it click for me.

The Windstar Moms

Before I started my company, I genuinely wanted to go get a master’s in organizational behavior. I am fascinated by how you uncover each person’s full potential to get the best outcomes for a team, whether that is a workplace, a sports team, or a marching band. And the thing I kept coming back to is that uncovering someone’s potential means letting them draw on one hundred percent of their life experience, not just the part listed on their resume.

My favorite example came from a story about Ford. Back in 2000, only a small fraction of automotive engineers were women. Ford did something notable. They put a team of women engineers together to make the Windstar minivan better for its core customer, mothers with children. The team became known as the Windstar Moms.

They drew on their actual lives as mothers and changed the product in ways a different team never would have thought of. Thinner steering wheels. Rectangular cup holders sized for juice boxes. And a larger gas tank, pushed hard by one engineer who was also a mom, because she hated nothing more than refueling with crying babies in the car. Her life as a mother informed her work as an engineer, and the product got dramatically better as a result.

That is the whole idea in one example. The insight did not come from market research. It came from lived experience that the engineers were finally allowed, and encouraged, to bring to work.

Why teams leave this on the table

Most workplaces quietly ask people to bring only the professional slice of themselves. You are an engineer, or a marketer, or a PM, and your job is the narrow function on your title. The rest of your life is supposed to stay home.

That is a waste, and it is often the difference between a product that technically works and one that customers love. The person on your team who grew up in the neighborhood you are selling into, or who has lived the exact problem you are solving, is carrying insight that no amount of research will replicate. If your culture does not invite that in, you never get it.

So part of building a great product team is making it safe and expected for people to say, “here is how my own life tells me this is wrong,” and to be taken seriously when they do.

How I try to use this

One of the things I care about most in how we build is encouraging the team to draw on their real experiences to solve real customer problems. Not just their training, their lives. The goal is to build products that are genuinely useful and genuinely good to use, and the fastest path to that is people who can feel the customer’s problem because they have lived some version of it themselves.

When you do this, you get two things at once. You build a better product, because you have insight competitors cannot buy. And you build more fulfilling work, because people get to bring their whole selves and see their real lives matter in what they create. Those two things reinforce each other.

I never did get that org-behavior master’s, at least not yet. Instead I got to roll up my sleeves and build a company where these ideas are not theory. They are how we work.

You are not just your job title. The most valuable thing you bring to a product might be the part of your life that has nothing to do with your role on paper.

So the next time you are stuck on a customer problem, do not only open the research. Ask who on your team has lived this, and what their life is trying to tell you. What is one thing from your own life, outside of work, that quietly makes you better at the work?

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From the original post, written on LinkedIn in 2024:

“Before starting Talisman, I wanted to go to Wharton and pursue a master’s degree in organizational behavior. I was (and am) fascinated by the idea of uncovering every team member’s full potential… how does a completely unrelated experience in my life help me with my work today?

Back in 2000, only 8.5% of engineers were women. It was notable then that Ford put 30 women engineers on the same team to make Windstar minivans more user-friendly for their core customer base: women with children… One of the Windstar Moms, Cindy Hodges, a mechanical engineer, pushed especially hard for the idea of a larger gas tank. She said, ‘There was nothing I hated more than refueling with crying babies.’… Her experience as a mother informed her work as an engineer and 10x’d her product as a result.

We encourage and inspire our team to draw from their life experiences to solve real customer problems as they build products. Just like the Windstar Moms did.”

Source: Mike’s LinkedIn post, 2024. The Windstar Moms and Cindy Hodges details are as Mike recounted them in that post.