I am realizing more & more the ridiculous power of having basically a whole team of creators on staff at a social media product company.

We’re working on revamping some of the scheduling tools & mechanics core to @Buffer – they’ve been relatively untouched for years, and in the ✨ age of AI ✨ there is a lot we could be doing to take the burden off the user (creators like you!) of knowing when that next post should be scheduled for. We are uniquely in a great position to do this, given the reach of our brand and the wealth of data & expertise we have on social.

Here’s the thing though: the details matter a ton on something like this. The system needs to be intuitive enough for any small creator or business owner but flexible to power freelance marketers. You need to trust the system’s decisions. So that requires a deep understanding of the use cases one needs to support and S-tier UX design and messaging around how the system is working.

What did I not need to do? Survey a ton of users to understand their use cases. Run a long, painful set of user tests.

What did we do instead? Asked our teammates for their use cases. Dogfed our first round of changes a ton internally – but not as a coordinated testing effort, but using the product as we normally would as creators ourselves.

And what did we get? A ton of use cases, and a ton of incredibly useful (and sometimes brutal) feedback, very quickly, from real creators who would be using this daily. My design partner & every engineer on this project is posting online via Buffer almost daily themselves, and we made on-the-fly changes based on our own intuition and experience trying it out.

And this all happened quickly: use case discovery to project kickoff to ready for beta in maybe a few weeks?

Yeah, yeah, I also intend to A/B test the same change with new users, to see how they respond to those first changes! But we got enough feedback to already tell me we haven’t nailed this first change yet. I can ship a better experiment with a quick bit of iteration from all the team feedback.

And that is just one manifestation of the value of working on a product where, day in day out, almost everyone in the company uses it.