Butterfield: Product creators suffer from 'the owner's delusion' about user patience
Stewart Butterfield · Mental models for building products people love ft. Stewart Butterfield · Nov 20, 2025 · at 1:28:29
Slack and Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield explains user empathy and product design pitfalls to Lenny Rachitsky.
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“When they get to their web, your website for the first time, their intent is absolutely the minimum number of micro points above the threshold required for them to actually take that action. You're like, all right, like, welcome to my website, and there's a bunch of, like, BS, and there's a bunch of, like, stuff that doesn't make any sense, and the buttons are inscrutable, and it's unclear what to do next, because I think that my thing is so important. And I don't recognize that you are at work, and you were late this morning, and you have to go to the bathroom, and you're just like a regular human being who has, like, stuff going on. You're concerned that your kids will fuck up, and they didn't get in trouble at school, and stuff like that. They don't, They're not like subjects who paid money to go to your play and are sitting in the audience and waiting for that curtain to go up. They're like people who are going to bounce in a fraction of a second, and so everyone should always be conscious of the honors delusion.”
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