Friction as correspondence

A customer tells us what they want is optimism given a microphone. What they need becomes clear later, during onboarding, when the software must actually touch their existing systems, and what they value later still, once they have been using the thing for long enough to stop performing enthusiasm for our benefit. These three moments rarely agree completely, and the disagreement between them is not noise to be filtered out. It may be the most honest information the team building it ever receives.

It is tempting, when the same piece of setup causes trouble for perhaps more than one customer, to treat it as a training problem, and to ask the people who sold the product to explain it better next time. I do not think that is quite fair to them. A salesperson can only describe the solution as it has been described to them, honestly and in good faith; they are not the ones positioned to discover, months later, that a particular integration is more brittle than anyone realised. If twenty hours of configuration are quietly required of every enterprise customer before the thing can be trusted to work, the useful question might not be how to explain that faster, but why the product still asks it of anyone.

Not every onboarding hiccup needs to turn into a roadmap item, which would be its own kind of carelessness. The more valuable habit, I think, is perhaps to treat the friction itself as correspondence, to read it as carefully as anything a customer ever says on a call, on the reasonable assumption that people are considerably more honest with a piece of software than they are, even without meaning to be, with the person who sold it to them.

That said, I would not want to overstate the case, since absorbing complexity is not free, and a company spending money that is not entirely its own does not have unlimited licence to chase polish for its own sake. That balance sits well above where I do, and rightly so. But there does seem to be a reasonable floor beneath it, wherever the ceiling ends up: whatever remains unabsorbed should not be allowed to cost a customer their afternoon, or cost a salesperson the deal they worked hard to earn. Everything above that floor is a genuinely difficult question about time and money. Below it, I do not think it is a difficult question at all.