Look Before You Leap

Go and see for yourself

The truth about your customer is not in your head or your spreadsheet. It's out there, where they actually struggle — and you have to go stand in it.

The trap

We build for a customer who lives in our head — a tidy, agreeable, imaginary person who wants exactly what we're building. The real one is messier, busier, and somewhere else.

The principle

The most important facts about your customer live outside your office. Three books say the same thing — Lean's 'go and see,' Blue Ocean's 'never outsource your eyes,' the MBA's forced-choice testing: firsthand observation beats any report, because a report is someone else's summary of a reality you never touched.

Case study · NYPD Transit (Bill Bratton)

New York's subway was so dangerous it was called the 'electric sewer,' yet the transit police stayed calm because only 3% of major crime happened underground. Bratton didn't hold a data meeting — he ordered his commanders, and himself, to ride the trains day and night until they personally faced what every rider faced.

→ Denial broke within weeks. Felony crime later fell by 39% on a frozen budget — because leaders who felt the reality could no longer pretend it wasn't there.

The honest note: going and seeing broke the complacency, but the later crime drop had many causes. First-hand experience changes minds faster than statistics — it isn't a complete explanation by itself.

Force the trade-off (don't ask what they 'want')
  1. Don't ask 'how important is X from 1 to 10' — everyone rates everything a 9.
  2. Put 4-5 real benefits on cards: price, speed, quality, location, service.
  3. Make them pick the MOST and the LEAST important from the set — forcing a real trade-off.
  4. Repeat with different combinations; the pattern reveals what they truly value.
  5. Build for what wins the trade-offs, not for what sounds nice in a survey.
Pitfall

Asking 'would you want this?' People say yes to be kind, and yes because wanting is free. The answer only becomes real when you force them to trade one benefit against another — or to trade money for it.

Force the trade-offMOSTLEASTLow priceFast deliveryTop qualityFriendly supportWide rangeOne of each — the trade-off no survey forces
A forced-choice card: from a set of 4-5 benefits, pick the single most important and the single least important — the trade-off that surveys never force.
Takeaway

Never outsource your eyes. Go where the customer struggles, watch instead of ask, and when you must ask, force a trade-off — because what people say they want and what they'll actually choose are two different things.

📌 Do this Monday

This week, spend one hour physically where your customer meets the problem — in the queue, at the job site, in the seat. Watch, don't sell, and write down one thing that surprised you.

Look Before You Leap