From product market fit to post-sales support, anthropology and human-centered design de-risk software, reducing rework and driving adoption, retention, and SaaS growth.
Throughout my career I’ve been told to “bury the Anthropology” by coaches and recruiters alike. “It’s confusing,” they said, “it’s a liability” or “it’s a distraction”. For the first time yesterday, an LLM said “keep it – it’s a differentiator”. I don’t need validation from an LLM, but after more than 20 years I still find myself surprised by how industry folks respond to my background.
For technology leaders and founders, a perspective on people is something you want in the room every step of the way. Anthropology – and human-centered design more broadly – ensures the product lifecycle centers around lived experiences instead of internal assumptions.
Why understanding people belongs at the start
If you build software without a deep understanding of human behavior, you end up paying for it later in expensive rework; would you prefer to spend $1 to fix a mockup or $100 to fix the code? The decision seems obvious to me. In addition to costly engineering rework, solutions designed without that human-centered perspective result in high support costs, low adoption, and eventually customer churn. The reason those solutions succeed or fail is bigger than just features and roadmaps. Leaders should be asking themselves “where in our lifecycle are we making assumptions about people and their behaviors, and who can help us unpack those assumptions?”.
Engaging with people across the product lifecycle
Help Desk. Early in my career, I worked in technical support answering up to seventy calls a day, I walked people through confusing software, failed updates, frozen screens, and yes, system reboots that resolved roughly half their problems. In my work I heard the same things over and over again – confusing workflows, unclear error messages, missing guardrails, poorly timed updates. So many of the of “technical issues” I fielded were actually interaction design issues, expectation issues, or training issues – all human problems.
Sales Operations. After moving from IT to Sales Operations, I conducted my first ethnographic research project, observing sales reps navigating complex enterprise solutions. It quickly became clear to me that these commercial systems were designed to meet management reporting needs, with little consideration for the sales rep and what they needed to manage a customer relationship. After shadowing salespeople, I translated my observations into recommendations for interfaces and workflows that reduced friction and enabled the reps to focus on their customers.
Product Innovation. Anthropology eventually brought me to product innovation and UX leadership, and I became responsible for educating executives and engineers about our findings and their implications for software development. For executives, this meant highlighting the gaps between their assumptions and our observations. For engineers, it meant translating our findings – a plethora of systems, limited attention, habitual behaviors, personal preferences – into requirements and designs grounded in reality rather than assumptions.
Data Science. Most recently I’ve been working at the intersection of UX and data science, helping teams design algorithms that are aligned with how people actually think, decide, and work. Our work has informed the contents and presentation of a newsfeed, which AI-generated recommendations to prioritize, how metrics are explained, and even the cadence of data pushes into the interface.
Post-Sales Functions. Even after a product ships, understanding people remains central. Training programs only work when they respect cognitive load and time constraints. Professional services succeed when they acknowledge power dynamics and not just “best practices.” And customer communities – both in B2B SaaS and in healthtech – can make or break a business. When designed with empathy and real incentives, communities drive adoption, footprint expansion, and retention, because they facilitate learning from peers, build identity around your product, and create a feeling of being seen by the company behind it.
Practical implications
If you are a founder or you play a leadership role in product or technology company, consider the following:
- Bring human-centered perspectives in to inform early innovations and product-market fit, not as a last-ditch effort once a product fails to meet expectations. This is not the work of a product manager, but of a UX practitioner with research expertise.
- Treat help desks, sales teams, and customer communities as continuous sources of customer insight. Those cross-functional relationships hold a wealth of insight.
- Seek human-centered insights throughout the product lifecycle and the customer journey. Your customers will thank you with their loyalty and ongoing investment in your work.
Ultimately, the “bury your PhD” advice shows a lack of understanding of how compelling software is imagined, designed, and built. The urgent need in technology is more leaders who recognize that understanding people is central to a successful software business.
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