The African philosophy of Ubuntu — 'I am because we are' — offers product managers a reframe on what 'user research' actually means. Ubuntu philosopher Mogobe Ramose argues that personhood is not a fixed property of individuals but something that emerges through relationship. Applied to product work: your users don't have static 'needs' waiting to be discovered in isolation. Their needs are constituted by the relationships, social contexts, and communities they're embedded in. A feature that tests well with individual users in a lab may completely miss how people actually use products — together, in context, in dialogue with others. The next time you're tempted to optimize for a single-user journey, ask whose community that user is actually embedded in.

Think of a product decision you made based on individual user data — what might you have missed by not studying the social or communal context that user was embedded in?

Drawing from African Philosophy (Ubuntu) — Mogobe Ramose (Ubuntu philosophy)