Maya ships an import tool that is four times faster than the one customers already use, watches nobody switch, and finds the old tool is wired into three other things the customer does
The Faster Tool Nobody Switched To — Volume I, Understanding Humans Before Products · Why Humans Change · Investigation · Foundations. Maya ships an import tool that is four times faster than the one customers already use, watches nobody switch, and finds the old tool is wired into three other things the customer does
01 · Opening
Maya ships an import tool that is four times faster than the one customers already use, watches nobody switch, and finds the old tool is wired into three other things the customer does
02 · The setup
Six weeks of work. The new importer reads a customer file in ninety seconds where the old one took six minutes.
Maya thinks: Four times faster. This one sells itself.
03 · The setup
Sam: I told the whole book about it. Nobody has to wait six minutes again.
04 · The evidence
Three weeks later, the adoption number is the first thing Maya opens and the last thing she wants to see.
New importer — accounts switched — Accounts offered: 1,240; Switched: 41; Still on the old importer: 1,199; Reported a problem: 3
05 · The evidence
Maya: Forty one. And only three complaints, so it is not broken.
Dev: It is not broken. It is just not worth it to them.
06 · The evidence
So Maya stops reading the dashboard and calls someone who did not switch.
Maya thinks: Nobody wrote in to say no. They just did nothing, and doing nothing is an answer.
07 · The evidence
Priya: The old importer drops a file in a folder. Our finance script watches that folder.
08 · The evidence
Priya: Then a rota depends on that. Then a report. Changing the importer means changing three things I did not build.
09 · The evidence
Maya asks the same question on eight more calls and writes down the answers in the customer's units, not hers.
What switching actually costs one account — Time saved per import: 4.5 min; Imports per month: 6; Saved per month: 27 min; Rewiring finance script: half a day; Re-testing the rota: half a day
10 · The evidence
People do not adopt a product because it is better. They move when the pain of staying gets larger than the cost of moving, and those are two different quantities measured by two different people.
You can see the pain of staying, because it happens inside your product. The cost of moving happens outside it — in scripts you did not write, habits you cannot observe, and a Tuesday afternoon somebody would rather not spend.
Twenty seven minutes a month against a day of rewiring is not a close call. It takes about two years to pay back, and nobody is budgeting two years for an importer.
11 · The evidence
Sam: So we built the wrong thing.
Maya: We built a fine thing and priced it in minutes when they were paying in days.
12 · You make the call
The story does not tell you first.
A. The speed improvement was too small to notice
B. The comparison customers ran was not the one the team ran
C. Customers did not know the new importer existed
13 · What happened
The next version keeps writing to the old folder. Nothing downstream has to change, and the switch stops being a project.
Maya thinks: Not faster. Cheaper to say yes to.
14 · Complete
Switching cost is part of your product, not an objection to it — and the customer is the only one who can price it. Next: why a feature everyone praises in interviews still goes quiet after week two.