What If You Stopped Designing for Who Your Customer Wants to Be?

What If You Stopped Designing for Who Your Customer Wants to Be?

Every product strategy framework tells you to build for your customer's aspirational self. The Snooze button never got that memo — and became one of the most-used features in human history. In this episode, we trace the surprisingly long history of not wanting to wake up, from medieval monks to Victorian knocker-uppers, and ask what it means for the products you are building right now.

The Tragedy of Analytical Correctness

Matt Maloney saw DoorDash coming. He predicted the losses, questioned the subsidies, and called the unit economics broken — years before the market proved him right. So why did Grubhub finish last? In this episode, we unpack one of the most underappreciated traps in business strategy: the difference between being analytically correct and being competitively correct. Being right about the market and winning the market are not the same thing — and the gap between them has killed more companies than bad strategy ever did. If you run a business, lead a team, or make decisions under competitive pressure, this one is worth your full attention.

The Ear Behind the Lens

For four hundred years, some of the greatest minds in human history could not figure out how to keep spectacles on a face. They tried hats, ribbons, wigs, handles, and nose bridges. The answer was sitting on the side of their head the entire time — free, available, perfectly shaped, completely ignored. In this episode, we trace why they missed it, what it reveals about how every business gets trapped staring at its product instead of watching its people, and what Andy Grove, IDEO, Kodak, and a pencil tucked behind an ear all have in common. The ear was always there. The question is whether your business is looking at it.

The Candle Strategy for Businesses

The candle should have died in 1879 when Edison lit the world. It didn't — and the reason why is one of the most overlooked strategy lessons in business history. In this episode, we trace how a simple stick of wax outlasted gas lamps, kerosene, and electricity by doing something most disrupted businesses never think to do: it stopped competing and started meaning something. From birthday cakes to Diwali to a ₹8,000 luxury candle that sells out every season — this is what product immortality actually looks like.

The Destination Dilemma: Deconstructing the Jim Collins' Bus Metaphor

Jim Collins' "First Who, Then What" is the most repeated principle in leadership — and one of the most misused. In this episode, we dissect why putting people before strategy sounds wise but gives executives a peer-reviewed excuse to avoid making hard directional calls. From Apple's 1997 turnaround to SpaceX's founding logic, the evidence keeps pointing the same way: great companies were built vision-first, talent second. We make the case for a better framework — and explain why Collins himself quietly violated his own rule.