When to ask "What is this most like?"
How to use pattern matching to quicken consensus
As our industry moves at an ever-faster pace, I’ve been reminding myself of tips for keeping large groups of people on the same page. Recently, I’ve dusted off an old favorite of mine: Asking the question “What is this most like?” when looking at project plans, ideas, or narratives.
Using existence proofs and pattern matching can quicken understanding - both bringing new people along quickly, reminding a close knit-crew of people about successes (or failures) they’ve had before, and acting as shorthand for explaining a project’s goals.
Let’s dig in and learn how any designer, product manager, or product leader can use these tactics to generate energy and drive clarity.
But Wait - This is the Era of AI - Everything is New!
Some of you are thinking, “But Adam, our industry is in a paradigm shift moment - the winning plans will be upending status quo, creating new categories, and defining novel UX metaphors - why anchor in the past?”
And it’s a great point (indeed, I’ve done a post about AI’s ambiguity before!) - there is a role and separate set of tactics for total revolution instead of reinvention. But the question, “What is this most like?” is still useful - in fact, it can help you hone exactly what is changing and what is staying the same. It drives intentionality with where you want to point the innovation machine on your team.
Indeed, whenever I use this question, I try to clarify which aspect of product design I’m talking about:
Is it about the job to be done? (e.g. “This is solving the same type of problem as Windows Control Panel does.”)
Is it about the go-to-market and business model? (e.g. “This is Uber for X”)
Is it about the UX model? (e.g. “This is just like Search in ChatGPT!”)
Is it about a simplicity/complexity bar? (e.g. “This should be as easy as iPhone’s Clean Up feature”)
This allows me to say things like “We are going to reinvent the user experience for this area, but the job it accomplishes is just like X.” This can focus a group on the right part of the problem.
Storytime: Three Examples from the Past Month
We use this often on our team, so as I was writing this post, I only had to look back a month or so to produce three examples of using this in practice.
“Agents are people, too.”
My first example comes from the world of AI. A lot of us in the industry are talking about AI agents - what skills they have, how they appear in a product’s UX, and how to explain them to users. In this case, agents are likely to cut across existing product and market categories to be hired for an entire process or job.
Here the pattern match has been less to existing pieces of software and more to the jobs that will be augmented by an agent. This agent is “most like” a project manager, or a software engineering or a marketing intern. Anchoring something new to an existing job quickens decision making and helps conceptual understanding.
“Let’s inventory what exists…”
We are looking at making some changes to the navigation and wayfinding of one of our products, and the homework that my design partner assigned us all was to suggest products in the industry that have a similar level of needs to combine multiple tools and apps into one framework.
This was effective in taking an abstract and ambiguous problem and enabled us to rapidly align on where the bar is for our new project based upon our shared use of apps and UX. We can say things like “We need a plan that is simpler that Adobe” or “We felt good about how WeChat approached tool aggregation.” It’s not about copying the ideas, it’s about aligning on the bar and then doing the hard work to contextualize them to our products.
“As simple as…”
Bar setting through example and metaphors can also be used for product storytelling as well.
As someone who owns an existing product (indeed, one that is 24 years old!), I’ve been trying to coach my team to simplify our product storytelling. It’s too easy to feel the need to explain every gotcha (we’ve had a lot of time to discover all of them!) instead of keeping our pitch simple and focused on a primary insight or truth.
That’s easy to say - but “make this simpler” is also feedback that is easy to dismiss. So what did I want our storytelling to be “most like?” I decided to take it to the extreme to really make my point.
The metaphor I chose was to be more like a traffic light, less like an airplane cockpit. Universally understood, simple, designed for even distracted drivers to understand. That’s what I wanted to set as the anchor point for the team in our pitch decks.
Wrapping up
As you can tell from these three examples, you can use the question “What is this most like?” in unique ways - it’s not just about “This product is Uber for X” but it can be used to set a simplicity bar, improve storytelling, or clarify what stays the same vs. changes across a paradigm shift.
I’ll close with one more tip: You can also use the opposite of this question, asking “What should this feature be NOT like?” This can help people name what needs to change or traps to avoid, like a pre-postmortem. Name the anti-pattern to avoid and you can often identify the whitespace a new product should tackle.
I like to say we need to make things as simple as necessary and no simpler.
If you’re driving a car, a stoplight is an additional complication to your user experience. The stoplight needs to be simple, in part, because the car’s controls need to be more complex.