Van Rest's Law

Simpler visuals are easier to remember and act on.

"You are not the user."

Jeroen van Rest

In Agile organizations, product teams often make assumptions about user needs based on their own logic or mental shortcuts. Van Rest's Law serves as a warning: the designer is not the user. This insight emerged from product design and human-centered engineering, where it became clear that creators tend to project their own knowledge, habits, and preferences onto the people they serve. Agile's emphasis on continuous feedback, iterative learning, and user value aligns directly with this law, yet teams frequently violate it by skipping or minimizing customer validation. Recognizing this pattern is critical for coaches guiding teams to become truly user-centric.

Impact on Agile Organizations

Ignoring Van Rest's Law can quietly erode product quality, relevance, and usability. Teams may ship features that are technically sound, but fail to resonate with users, often due to biased assumptions about how people think, behave, or engage with products.

  1. Misaligned Product Development:
    • Features are based on team preferences instead of user behavior.
    • Prioritization decisions reflect internal logic, not customer value.
  2. Reduced User Satisfaction:
    • Interfaces or flows feel intuitive to the team but are confusing to actual users.
    • Accessibility or inclusivity concerns are overlooked due to homogeneous design perspectives.
  3. Waste of Time and Resources:
    • Development cycles are spent polishing ideas that require rework after launch.
    • Usability testing happens late or not at all, leading to last-minute fixes.
  4. Overconfidence in Intuition:
    • Teams believe "we know our users""" without verifying.
      • This often leads to skipping validation rituals like A/B testing, journey mapping, or empathy interviews.
      • Personas are created and ignored or become outdated due to lack of engagement.

Scenario

A mature Scrum team builds a mobile dashboard for customers to view and track service usage. They design the interface using a nested tab system, which all team members find elegant. During their Sprint Review, a stakeholder mentions it's hard to find key information, and actual users later report confusion navigating the tabs. By the time the team responds, they have already invested multiple Sprints refining a design that failed its primary purpose.

  • The team had not tested the prototype with end users.
  • Their assumptions were based on internal product knowledge.
  • They believed customer success agents could act as surrogates for end users.

Had they validated early with real customers, they might have avoided significant rework. The delay cost the team two full Sprints and shook stakeholder confidence.

Ways to Mitigate:

Agile teams can counter the effects of Van Rest's Law by embedding user feedback into their rhythms and design philosophy.

  1. Empathy-driven Discovery:
    • Conduct regular user interviews and contextual inquiry.
    • Observe users interacting with the product in their real environments.
  2. Feedback Loops in Design:
    • Create lightweight prototypes for early feedback.
    • Integrate usability testing into Definition of Done.
  3. Cross-functional Collaboration:
    • Involve UX professionals in Backlog Refinement.
    • Encourage developers to sit in on customer support calls.
  4. Decision-making with Data:
    • Leverage analytics to observe actual behavior rather than guessing.
    • Use A/B testing or feature flags to explore design assumptions.
  5. Culture of Humility:
    • Reinforce that even experienced teams need outside perspectives.
    • Normalize being wrong about what users want.
Conclusion:

Agile teams often start with the best intentions: serve the user, learn fast, and deliver value. But without active, structured user involvement, they default to what makes sense to them. Van Rest's Law reminds us that users are not extensions of the team, they are separate, complex, and sometimes unpredictable. Ignoring that fact is a recipe for flawed solutions.

  • Coaching should prioritize user immersion, not just iterative delivery.
  • Customer proxies are helpful but should not replace real customer feedback.
  • Product thinking requires ongoing validation, not just up-front discovery.

Key Takeaways

  • Van Rest's Law warns that teams often mistake their preferences for user needs.
  • Misalignment results in wasted effort, poor usability, and customer dissatisfaction.
  • Frequent user testing and feedback help reveal blind spots in design.
  • Empathy must be earned through interaction, not assumed through experience.
  • Agile ceremonies should support, not replace, human-centered insight.

Summary

Van Rest's Law challenges the assumption that teams can design effectively from within their own worldview. Agile teams must fight the natural tendency to build for themselves by continuously validating their work with real users. When empathy and evidence are prioritized alongside iteration, products are more likely to meet real needs, reduce rework, and build lasting trust.

Van Rest's Law