📖Why Every Product Builder Should Read Children's Books

People are often surprised when I tell them that some of the best product lessons I have learnt came from children's books. They expect me to say they came from building software, or from leading academics across a large network of schools. Those taught me plenty. But the sharpest lessons about clarity, about respecting your user, and about getting out of the way came from picture books and early readers.

Running a children's publishing house will do that to you. So will years of reading programmes and storytelling sessions in schools, where you watch, in real time, whether a story holds a room of children or loses them by the second page.

Here is my argument, plainly: children's books are the most ruthlessly edited artefacts in publishing, and anyone who builds products should study them.

Every word has to earn its place

A picture book might have a few hundred words. Sometimes fewer. That is not because the writer was lazy. It is because every sentence that survives has fought its way through draft after draft, and everything that did not serve the story was cut.

When you work on a children's book, you learn quickly that you cannot hide behind length. There is no chapter seven where you can explain what you meant in chapter two. If a line confuses the reader, the reader closes the book. If a page drags, a small hand turns it before you have finished.

Now think about the last product you used that had three onboarding screens, two tooltips and a modal explaining a feature you did not ask for. Most of that exists because nobody was willing to make the hard cut. We add copy when we are unsure. We add settings when we cannot decide. We add features because adding feels like progress.

A good children's editor would draw a line through half of it. Most products would be better for it.

The reader is not you

One of the first things anyone in children's publishing has to unlearn is the instinct to write for themselves. The adult author finds a joke clever, a word lovely, a moral important. The child does not care. The child wants to know what happens next, and whether the bear is going to be all right.

This is the oldest lesson in product design, and we keep forgetting it. We build for the person in the meeting, the stakeholder with the loudest opinion, or the version of the user that lives in our heads. Children's books force you to confront the real reader, because the real reader is so obviously different from you. There is no pretending a four-year-old thinks the way you do.

I have sat in on enough storytelling sessions to know that children are the most honest user-testers alive. They do not give polite feedback. They fidget, they wander off, they start talking to the person next to them. Or they lean in, go quiet, and ask you to read it again. Either way, you know.

I wish more product teams had access to that kind of honesty. Adults are polite in interviews. Children are not. The closest product equivalent is watching what users actually do rather than what they say, and it is uncomfortable for the same reason.

Pictures and words have to work together

In a good picture book, the illustration does not repeat the text. It adds to it. The words might say "Everything was fine," while the picture shows a cat quietly knocking over a vase in the background. The child notices. The child is delighted to be in on it.

That interplay is a lesson in interface design. Text and visuals should not duplicate each other; each should carry the part of the meaning it carries best. A button label, an icon and a layout are all telling the same story, and when they agree and complement each other, the user feels clever. When they contradict each other, the user feels stupid, and nobody likes a product that makes them feel stupid.

This is also why I believe comics are literature, and why I think product people should read those too. A comic artist decides what goes in each panel and, just as importantly, what happens in the gutter between panels, where the reader fills in the gap. Good products work the same way. They trust the user to make small leaps. They do not explain every step.

Repetition is a feature, not a flaw

Adults often find children's books repetitive. The same refrain on every page, the same structure, the same three tries before the thing finally works. To a child, that repetition is a gift. It builds confidence. By the third page, they can predict what comes next, and they can join in. They feel ownership of the story.

Product builders tend to chase novelty. Every screen a little different, every flow designed fresh. But consistency is what lets a user feel at home. When a pattern repeats, the user stops thinking about the interface and starts thinking about what they came to do. The refrain in a picture book and the consistent navigation in a good app are doing the same job.

Empathy without condescension

The worst children's books talk down to children. They are preachy, or saccharine, or so careful that nothing interesting happens. Children can smell it immediately.

The best children's books take children seriously. They deal with fear, loss, jealousy, boredom and silliness, honestly and at the right scale. They are kind without being soft.

I think this is the right posture for products too. Simplicity is not the same as treating users as if they cannot cope. A simple product respects the user's time and intelligence. A condescending product hides things, over-explains, and decides on the user's behalf. The difference is subtle in a spec document and obvious to anyone using the thing.

What I would ask a product team to try

If you build products, here is what I would suggest. It is not a framework, just a habit.

• ▸Pick up a handful of well-loved picture books and read them aloud. Notice where you pause, where the page turns, and what is left unsaid.
• ▸Take one screen of your product and try to rewrite its copy with the discipline of a picture book. Cut until it hurts, then cut once more.
• ▸Watch someone use your product the way you would watch a child listen to a story. Look for the fidget and the lean-in, not the polite nod.
• ▸Ask whether your visuals and words are telling the same story, or merely repeating each other.

Spending time with children's books has made me more impatient with bloated products and more appreciative of the ones that feel effortless. Effortless almost always means someone did a lot of hard, invisible editing.

The best stories, and the best products, feel inevitable. That feeling is manufactured, one cut at a time.

So the next time someone on your team asks for inspiration, skip the case studies for an afternoon. Go to the children's section of a bookshop or a library. Sit on one of those small chairs if you can manage it. Read. You will come back with sharper instincts than any slide deck will give you.

And if you have a child at home, read to them tonight. Watch their face. That is the most honest product review you will ever get.