shape

If You Can’t Name the User, You’re Guessing

Clarity starts when you can picture a real person, not a segment.

Matt vibe2value

Matt, vibe2value

— 2 min read
If you can’t picture the person, you’ll build for yourself and you won’t notice until late.

A real user has:

  • Context (where they are, what they’re trying to do)
  • Pressure (time, consequences, competing priorities)
  • Constraints (tools, skill level, approvals, budget, risk)

When the user is vague, everything downstream gets vague too:

  • requirements expand because nothing is excluded
  • defaults become arbitrary
  • “simple” workflows need endless exceptions
  • you optimise the wrong thing
  • you ship something that only makes sense to you

flowchart TD A[User is vague] --> B[Vague decisions] B --> C[Drift + rework] C --> D[Wrong outcome] A --> E[User Snapshot] E --> F[Clear scope + exclusions] F --> G[Fewer guesses]

Vague user definitions create drift. A named user creates a boundary.

Note: The full user snapshot template is in the members section.

A practical boundary
Before you build anything, write a “User Snapshot” you could disagree with.

Minimum viable version

  • Who are they (role + environment)?
  • What are they trying to get done today?
  • What do they not have (time, access, skill, authority)?
  • What do they not trust (or what can’t be broken)?
  • What does failure cost them?
  • What does “good enough” look like?

Key takeaway
If the user isn’t clear, everything that follows is a guess.

That’s the core idea: name the user early so you’re not guessing later.

Members: template + examples + the build-time prompt I use to pressure-test a vague audience into a usable boundary.

If you’re building on the Cloudflare Worker stack, the members section often translates these ideas into code.

Read more