Discovered, Not Decided

Don’t Spoil The Magic Trick

I have a couple catchphrases I use a lot at work. One of my favorites is:

“Discovered, not decided.”

Here’s what I mean by that.

Building any kind of new technology is an act of pure creation. It’s hard. You’re literally performing a magic trick. You’re taking a job that used to require hours of human attention and finding a way to make it happen automatically. This is why good software is so amazing. It can save people hours of their lives every day — and in many cases, it does the work better than a person ever could.

But there’s a side effect to performing this kind of magic trick. Sometimes, we get so enamored with what we’ve built, that instead of telling a story about why it’s useful and how it makes peoples’ lives easier, something compels us to tell people exactly how the product works from start to finish. We can’t help ourselves. We’re proud of what we’ve created, and we want to share everything about it — how it’s built, what it does, and how to use it — with anyone who will listen.

Taking pride in your work isn’t the issue. The problem is how the halo effect of that workmanlike pride warps the story you tell to customers. When you spend your time head down, solving the long string of problems that leads to a working, sellable product, you start to hallucinate a bit. You start to believe that the only thing that matters is accurately describing the intricate workings of this amazing thing you’ve built. You start to think that people need to know how the magic trick works, step-by-step, before they’ll accept what you’re showing them. Then, one day you wake up. You’re 45 minutes into a demo with a customer. You realize you’ve been talking non-stop the entire time, that you haven’t asked a question yet, and that you’ve dragged this person into every little nook and cranny of your product.

And you realize — you have no idea if they’re still with you or not.

You’ve spoiled the magic trick.

Discovering vs. Deciding

The issue here isn’t going too deep or being too technical. The issue is that you decided what was most interesting about your product and then structured the entire conversation around those things. The features you think are most impressive. The look and feel. The architecture. The flow. You made up your mind about what to highlight and what to talk about based on your experience, not based on the person who you built it for.

Basically, you guessed. And most of the time, when you’re deep down, buried in the details you need to live in to make anything great, you guess wrong. As a result, you end up telling a “product-out” story instead of a “customer-in” story, built from real anecdotes and examples from people just like them who already use and appreciate what you’ve created. A story you can only discover by listening to the people you built this thing for in the first place.

There’s a bunch of classic business platitudes out there (especially in my world of B2B software) that all boil down to the point I’m making: Of course you should be talking to your customers. But I’ve noticed that this advice is often framed as obviously self-evident, and absent of a why.

Nobody bothers to unpack what talking to customers actually does for you, or, more importantly, what it protects you from.

Here’s my take. The biggest benefit of talking to customers — and of entering these conversations open-minded and hungrily curious about the parts of their job we’ve managed to magically automate for them — is that you don’t have to guess anymore. You can know how real people are using what you’ve built, what parts of it they find most valuable, and the nuggets that others like them are likely to latch onto, if you’re only willing to talk about them.

And when you know that, everything else — product, marketing, sales, and running the business — gets a lot easier.

So, yeah.

When I say “Discovered, Not Decided,” that’s what I mean.

Author’s Note: I’ve started to move my writing to Substack over at hellooperator.substack.com. If you enjoyed this post, I hope you’ll consider checking out the rest of my work over there. Thanks for reading.