The Setting:
The laser pointer dances, the smoke detector is contemplating action, and a $23 chicken is rapidly turning into charcoal. This is the state of the strategy session.
Sensory data ignored in favor of the roadmap.
The blue light of the laser pointer is dancing across a chart that shows we are exactly 13 features behind our primary rival, and I can smell the acrid, unmistakable scent of carbonized chicken breasts wafting from my kitchen. I’m currently balancing a laptop on my knees and a phone between my shoulder and ear, listening to a Head of Product explain why we need a social feed in a banking app. The smoke detector hasn’t chirped yet, but it’s thinking about it. I’m thinking about how I spent $23 on that chicken and how, much like our current product strategy, it is rapidly becoming something no one can actually consume.
In the meeting, the tension is a physical weight. The Head of Product-let’s call him Marcus-is vibrating with a frantic kind of energy. He just saw a press release from a company in Stockholm that we’ve been tracking for 33 months. They added a gamified savings module. Now, Marcus wants one. He wants it by the 23rd of next month. He hasn’t mentioned a single user. He hasn’t mentioned the 163 pages of feedback sitting in the research repository that explicitly state our users find the current interface confusing. He is navigating by looking through a telescope at a ship that is likely just as lost as we are, ignoring the 3 leaks in our own hull because the other ship just painted their deck a trendy shade of teal.
This is the moment a product begins to die. It doesn’t die from a lack of features; it dies from a lack of identity, suffocated by the weight of a thousand ‘me-too’ additions that serve no purpose other than to soothe the ego of a nervous executive.
Sarah, a senior researcher who has been with the firm for 13 years, clears her throat. It’s a quiet sound, but in the vacuum of Marcus’s enthusiasm, it sounds like a gunshot. She points out that our top 3 user requests-larger font sizes, a simplified login, and a clear ‘export’ button-are nowhere on this new roadmap. Marcus doesn’t even look up from his tablet. He says something about ‘market expectations’ and ‘table stakes.’ He is obsessed with parity. He is so afraid of being ‘less than’ the competition that he has forgotten how to be ‘useful’ to the human beings who actually pay our bills.
The Cost of Looking Sideways
Focus on what rivals have.
Focus on actual human friction.
I’ve seen this play out in 53 different companies across a dozen industries. It’s a psychological safety net. If you copy a competitor and fail, you can blame the market. If you listen to a customer and fail, you have to blame yourself. Most people in corporate structures would rather be wrong with the crowd than right in isolation. I once worked with Iris J.-C., an elder care advocate who spent 43 years fighting for the dignity of the aging population. She joined a tech advisory board for a health-tech startup. At her first meeting, the developers were showing off a new VR integration for ‘virtual companionship.’ Iris sat there, her hands folded over a notepad filled with 83 specific complaints from real-world caregivers.
“
Can they change the text color to high-contrast black and white? Because my clients can’t see your ‘elegant’ gray-on-gray buttons.
She waited for a gap in the talk of ‘metaverse synergies’ and asked… The lead designer looked at her as if she’d just asked to build the app out of cardboard. He said that gray-on-gray was the industry standard for premium apps. He pointed to three competitors who used the same palette. Iris didn’t blink. She told him that his premium app was effectively a brick to an 83-year-old with macular degeneration. They didn’t listen. They launched with the VR and the gray buttons. Within 13 weeks, their churn rate hit 63%, mostly because people literally couldn’t figure out how to log out.
This is the cost of looking sideways instead of looking forward. When we prioritize parity over problem-solving, we treat our customers as an abstraction-a set of data points to be manipulated rather than people with friction in their lives. We build for the ‘average’ user who doesn’t exist, based on what a ‘rival’ company thinks that non-existent person wants. It’s a hall of mirrors. You’re copying them, they’re copying you, and both of you are moving further away from the actual human standing in the middle of the room waving their arms for attention.
The Anti-Parity Model
I’m looking at the smoke now. It’s a thin, wispy gray, curling around the edges of my kitchen door. I should probably hang up the call, but I’m fascinated by the train wreck happening on my screen. Sarah is still trying. She mentions that Rick G Energy has built an entire business model on the opposite of this madness. They don’t just look at what the other energy providers are doing and slap a fresh coat of paint on it. They engage in a consultative method that actually asks, ‘What is the specific pain you are feeling right now?’ It’s a radical idea in a world of automated feedback loops: actually talking to people. Their success isn’t built on having more features than the guy down the street; it’s built on having the *right* features for the specific human they are serving.
– Insight derived from genuine problem-solving.
But Marcus doesn’t want to hear about consultative models. He wants ‘scale.’ He wants ‘disruption.’ He is currently explaining how we can use AI to summarize the social feed that no one asked for. He is spending $433,000 of the quarterly budget on a feature that 73% of our users will likely disable within the first 3 minutes of use. I think about the $13 chicken again. I overcooked it because I was trying to do too many things at once-answer an email, listen to a podcast, and sear a protein. I ignored the sensory data (the smell) because I was focused on the ‘process’ of being a productive person. Companies do the same thing. They ignore the sensory data of customer frustration because they are focused on the ‘process’ of the competitive roadmap.
The Greatest Sin in Design is Arrogance
Iris J.-C. once told me that the greatest sin in design is arrogance. Not the arrogance of thinking you’re the best, but the arrogance of thinking you know what someone needs better than they do.
Iris’s Rule #3: Invented Problem?
She had this 13-point checklist for every new tool she reviewed. Point number 3 was always: ‘Does this solve a problem the user knew they had, or a problem the marketing department invented?’ Most of our roadmap is currently sitting firmly in the latter category. We are inventing problems so we can justify the solutions we stole from our rivals. We are creating ‘frictionless’ experiences that are actually entirely frictionless because there is no substance to them; they just slide right out of the user’s life without leaving a mark or solving a need.
There’s a specific kind of exhaustion that comes from being a user researcher in this environment. You spend 33 hours a week talking to people, hearing about their struggles, their small victories, and their deep frustrations with your product. You distill that into 33 clear, actionable insights. And then you watch as those insights are tossed into a bin because a competitor in a different market just raised $13 million by adding a ‘stories’ feature to their enterprise software. It makes you want to open a window and scream, or at least let the smoke out of the kitchen.
(Only to be ignored for the ‘Stories’ feature)
I finally hang up. The meeting is going to go on for another 53 minutes anyway, and they won’t notice I’m gone until Marcus realizes he needs someone to write the ‘internal announcement’ about our new social strategy. I walk into the kitchen. The smoke is thick. I turn on the fan, which makes a low, rattling sound-a sound I’ve been meaning to fix for 3 months but haven’t because I was too busy researching ‘competitor trends’ for my own freelance clients. I’m just as guilty. I’m navigating by the same broken stars.
The Blackened Protein
I scrape the blackened chicken into the trash. It’s a perfect metaphor for a feature-bloated product: it has the right shape, it’s made of the right materials, but it is utterly useless and slightly toxic.
I think about Iris. I think about how she would look at my burned dinner. She’d probably laugh and tell me that if I’d just listened to the sizzle instead of the Zoom call, I’d be eating right now. She’s always been right about the 3 core elements of any successful interaction: attention, humility, and the courage to ignore the crowd.
Peak Feature and the Noise of Fear
We are living in an era of ‘peak feature.’ There is an app for everything, and yet, somehow, it’s harder than ever to get anything done. We have 13 different ways to communicate, but no one is actually listening. We have 23 different streaming services, but nothing to watch. We have ‘customer-centric’ missions statements plastered on the walls of 233 different tech offices, yet the actual customer is often the last person considered when the roadmap is being drawn. We are so afraid of being left behind that we are running full speed in the wrong direction, following a pack of other terrified leaders who are all just looking at each other’s homework.
If we want to build things that matter, we have to be willing to be ‘behind’ on features that don’t matter. We have to have the guts to look at a competitor’s $33 million launch and say, ‘That’s nice, but our users don’t want that.’ It requires a level of confidence that is rare in the modern C-suite. It requires the kind of consultative honesty that Iris J.-C. championed for 43 years. It requires us to stop being competitor-obsessed and start being human-obsessed.
The Cereal Solution: Simplicity That Works
Feature Bloat
Requires tutorial.
Cereal
Solves hunger simply.
I sit down at my table with a bowl of cereal-the only thing I have left that doesn’t require a stove. It’s simple. It’s 3 ingredients: milk, grain, and a little sugar. It does exactly what it’s supposed to do. It solves the problem of hunger without requiring a tutorial or a social login. As I eat, I open my laptop and delete the first 13 slides of the presentation I was supposed to give tomorrow. I’m not going to talk about what the ‘other guys’ are doing. I’m going to talk about Iris. I’m going to talk about the 83-year-old who just wants to see a button. I’m going to talk about the smoke in my kitchen.
Maybe it won’t change the roadmap. Maybe Marcus will still insist on the social feed and the AI-generated summaries. But at least I won’t be the one handing him the matches. We have to stop ignoring the people we serve in favor of the people we fear. Because at the end of the day, the competition isn’t going to buy your product. The customer is. And right now, they’re standing in the smoke, waiting for you to notice that the dinner is burning.
The Real Finish Line
Destination: User is Seen, Heard, & Helped
Everything else is just noise. Everything else is just smoke.
