Often the loudest voice in the design room is the admin user. The admin user uses the application the most and are intimately familiar with the what needs to be fixed. However, looking at the total number of users in your application, you may find that the total number of users that are not admin users greatly outnumber the small handful of admin users. You may think back and look at your user stories and find that all of your user stories were directly created by admin users rather than the individual users who are not admin users. No big deal, right?
You could not be further from the truth. Yes, the admin user may be the one paying the bill, but in the grand scheme, if the majority of your application’s users are not admin users, you may have completely overlooked your most important user group. You may have built an application that is only useful from the perspective of the admin user, rather than building an application that is most useful for the majority of your users.
This is a product problem. You might have only had admin users in the design room with your designers, and no one thought to ask, how does the admin user fit in the overall list of users. If you don’t have non-admin users representing your loudest voice in your UX room, you are doing something wrong from a product standpoint. You are selling to the wrong person. You are building for the wrong user.
So what? Well, what happens if that core individual admin user group leaves the company and they were the only one who actually knew how to use the application, nor have they had the chance to bring all the other user groups on board? Well, now you don’t have anyone at the company who knows how to use your application. A new admin user might be hired and want to do something completely different.