I was in a meeting when I realized what was happening. The team was excited. Animated, even. Talking over each other about tools, models, infrastructure, and new capabilities. Someone kept using the word “cool.”
Cool.
That’s when I stopped the conversation.
Because cool is not a customer. Cool is how the builder feels. Cool is internal enthusiasm dressed up as a business rationale. And when a team starts making decisions based on what’s cool, the customer has already left the room.
So I asked one question: What actually matters here?
The Answer Is Always the Same
The customer.
Not the stack. Not the architecture. Not the revenue target on a slide. The customer, the actual human whose life either gets better or doesn’t because of what we decide to do in this room.
Here’s what I’ve learned: teams don’t drift toward bad intentions. They drift toward interesting problems. Toward technically elegant solutions. Toward things that make engineers feel smart, and product managers feel visionary. It’s easy. It feels like progress.
But the customer doesn’t care how elegant your infrastructure is. They don’t wake up thinking about your stack. They wake up with a problem. And they want to know if you’re going to solve it, meaningfully, not marginally.
Not a little better. Not slightly improved. Significantly better.
If you can’t say that clearly, you’re not ready to move forward.
Tell Them Directly
At that moment, I pointed to a chair at the table where Sorcerer Mickey was sitting, indicating that the customer had a seat there. The customer is sitting right there, I said. Not in a persona document. Not in a user story. Right there. Now explain to them, directly, out loud, how this decision improves their life.
Not internally. Not in abstractions. To them.
If you can do that, move forward. If you’re fumbling, hedging, or talking about capabilities instead of outcomes, stop. The decision needs more thinking.
This isn’t a framework. It’s a test. And most ideas fail it.
Revenue Is What Happens After
Many organizations treat revenue as the goal. It’s not. Revenue is the result. The goal is value. Significant value. The kind that makes customers stay, come back, and tell other people. When you deliver that, revenue follows. When you optimize for revenue first, you start making decisions the customer never asked for and wouldn’t pay for if they understood what you were actually building.
The sequence matters: value first, revenue second. Flip it, and you’ve already lost.
The Only Question Worth Asking
Before you commit to any initiative, any tool, any feature, any investment, someone in the room has to stand up and answer this in plain language:
How does this improve the customer’s life, and will they feel the difference?
Not “it improves efficiency.” Not “it positions us well.” A specific answer about a specific person with a specific problem.
If no one can answer it, the chair is empty.
And an empty chair means you’re building for yourselves.
One More Thing: Cool Isn’t the Enemy
I want to be precise here, because if you read this as “always ask the customer what to build,” I’ve misled you.
Claude Code wasn’t born from a customer survey. It was built by one person who thought it would be cool to let an AI agent work directly in a developer’s terminal. No focus group validated it. No customer asked for it. It came from conviction.
And it changed how developers work.
Steve Jobs didn’t ask customers if they wanted a touchscreen phone. He knew something about them they couldn’t yet articulate. The Wright Brothers weren’t iterating on faster horses.
Breakthrough products are rarely pulled from customers. They’re pushed by people who understand customers so deeply that their conviction becomes the customer insight, before the customer can see it themselves.
That’s a completely different thing from what I was diagnosing in that meeting.
The problem isn’t cool. The problem is that it’s disconnected from any customer truth. Cool as a feeling. Cool as self-expression. Cool that, when challenged, can’t point to a single human whose life it improves.
The test isn’t “did the customer ask for this?” The test is: do you know them well enough that your conviction is grounded in their reality, even if they can’t see it yet?
If yes, build it. Fight for it. The chair isn’t empty just because the customer hasn’t spoken.
If no, you’re not innovating. You’re indulging.
How do you tell the difference? That’s a harder question, and I’ll break it down in the next post.
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