limited·by·sleep
$ cd ~/published

Your customers have already accepted problems you haven't found

Your customers have already accepted the problems you haven't found yet.

I asked a customer to show me how they were using a feature my team had just built. Within minutes, I watched them switch tabs repeatedly, hunting for data that wasn't on the page, copying it back across manually. Every single time they used the feature.

It wasn't in the original ticket. We'd never discussed it in planning. I'm not a daily user of the product, so it hadn't occurred to me either.

The fix took very little time. When they tried it again, the difference was immediate. But here's what stuck with me: they were never going to ask for that change. They assumed the tab-switching was just how it worked. To me, they were working around a broken system. To them, it was simply the system.

This is the problem that no amount of feedback forms or sprint reviews will surface. People adapt to friction so quickly that it becomes invisible to them. If clunky is all you've ever known, clunky just feels like normal. You don't file a ticket for normal.

The most impactful improvements I've made haven't come from feature requests. They've come from spotting the workarounds that nobody thought to mention, the small inefficiencies that users had long stopped noticing because they'd built their habits around them.

If you're only fixing the things people complain about, you're missing the bigger picture. The real friction lives in the things they've stopped complaining about.

follow via rss