Five days ago, my son was born. Two days later, my wife and I left the hospital and brought him home. I remember the feeling of introducing a newborn to our house. Unfamiliar. Surreal. Completely unprecedented. Of course, what lay ahead of us would prove far tougher.

A newborn comes with three very distinct user needs:

1. Eat
2. Sleep
3. Have their diapers changed

That the theory part of it at least. In practice, it’s a lot more chaotic. If you’re a parent to a newborn, especially if you’re running on no sleep, you’ll know what I’m talking about.

The constant crying. The endless cluster feedings. A timer running to track all feeding sessions. A flow chart to decode the cries with corresponding steps for each (yes, I even drew a UML diagram in FigJam). And not to mention those moments when you watch when your child scream from hunger, only to refuse to latch. The food’s right there, dude!

Throw in two severely sleep-deprived parents, and you’ve got a veritable case study in feeling completely out of your depth. 

The first real solution is to take a step back and actually listen to your baby. The baby will tell you when it’s hungry and when it wants to eat. Feeding is something it learns instinctively right after birth, crawling onto its mother’s chest within the first hour of life. (Note: There are probably exceptions to this, and I’m no medical expert, so take don’t take this as gospel.)

That is exactly where we struggled those first few days. Then we met our midwife and lactation specialist who spelled it out for us. In retrospect, it was mind-boggling. Instead of overanalysing and trying to systematise every step, just listen to the baby. Trust the baby’s instincts to steer the moment.

In many ways, it reminded me of product development. It is the same principle. You have to listen to your users and understand what they actually want. What problems do they face and what are they willing to pay to solve that problem? And when I say problem, I mean the kind that makes you scream at the top of your lungs and wake your parents from a dead sleep.

In many ways, parenting is like Design Thinking. It’s Continuous Discovery. It’s JTBD. It’s experimentation through two-tailed tests and one-tailed tests. It’s applying a user-centric approach in the pursuit of outcomes. 

Product development is no different. At its heart, software development is full of unknowns. You cannot plan everything upfront.

Great software has a few key qualities:

• Viability -> It delivers ROI for the company
• Desirability -> People are willing to pay for it
• Feasibility -> You can build it with relative ease or without unnecessary complexity

But since time and development resources are limited, every initiative should be weighed against these criteria. Prioritising what gets built is a constant exercise. If you want a structured way to do this that isn’t too complicated, check out Simplifying Feature Prioritisation.

Now, sometimes you are solving a cultural problem. In large organisations it is often a communication problem. Frameworks like SAFe may look like the answer, but anyone who has read that framework knows how complex it gets. The endless roles and processes do not magically ship software. (It does make a lot of middle-managers feel important, though.)

The real goal is understanding what to build to maximise value for your company, whether in the short term or long term.

To wrap things up, it has only been five days, but the surreal has not worn off. Neither has the hard part. But we feel a lot more confident now. Turns out, listening to your newborn is the key to awesome baby development.