Matthias SpeicherIn short
When a product fails in everyday use, the effort sits in the wrong place. The customer has to learn, work around, restart, put up with it. But that effort doesn’t belong in the customer’s daily life. It belongs in the development of the system, before launch. That’s where there’s time, data and method to remove friction. The customer has none of that. Three levers move the effort to where it belongs.
The first part was about the diagnosis. Products are bought for the exception and judged in everyday use, and it’s the repetition of small friction that decides whether people stay or leave. That leaves the question of what to do about it. And the answer starts with a shift, namely the question of where the effort lands.
The effort sits in the wrong place
In many products the effort after purchase lands on the customer. They have to learn how the system ticks. They have to find ways around the friction. They have to restart what won’t run on its own. They have to accept what can’t be changed. That’s exactly where erosion happens, in this quiet transfer of effort from the maker to the user.
But the effort doesn’t belong in the customer’s everyday life. It belongs in the development of the system, before launch, before the first delivery. That’s where people sit who should be given the time for it, even if they aren’t always given it, and who have the data and the methods to spot friction and remove it. The customer has none of that. They only have their morning, their hurry, and a product that either pulls its weight or gets in the way.
That sounds obvious and still rarely gets built that way. Because shifting the effort onto the customer costs nothing, at least not visibly and not straight away. It costs later, in the form of customers who leave quietly.
Why you can’t simply ask customers
The obvious reflex is: then let’s just ask customers what they want. That falls short, for a simple reason. Customers describe symptoms, and they reach for solutions they already know.
They say something is cumbersome, takes too long, doesn’t work as expected. That’s valuable, but it’s the surface. And when they propose a solution, it’s usually the familiar one. With charging, many people demand paying by card, because they know it from refuelling and because it feels like an answer to app chaos and opaque pricing. Except the card often means more steps, more interaction, more friction. What matters is that this only works if you fix the underlying problem. A solution aimed merely against the card, without addressing the root cause, fails. And that’s exactly what we’re seeing in the market. An integrated approach solves the same problem in a fundamentally different way, not through an added option, but through a system design where the customer simply plugs in and the rest runs on its own. The next step then isn’t the card, it’s no step at all.
Customers often say what they want, but not always what they need. The task is to tell the two apart.
Three levers against erosion
With that, erosion isn’t something you repair once it’s there, but something you prevent from the start. Three levers work together for this.
The first is time-to-friction analysis with real customers. Not in the lab, not in a synthetic test environment, but in direct exchange, for instance through a customer advisory board. The guiding question isn’t whether the product works, but exactly where everyday use stalls. The precondition is allowing the uncomfortable voices in too, the ones that don’t praise but show you where it snags. Where everyday use stalls won’t show up in a spec sheet. You only learn it from the people who use the product every day.
The second lever is a rigorously customer-centred value proposition. That means looking past the symptom to understand the actual job the customer wants done, along with the pains that stand in their way and the gains they’re after. Ask the right questions and you find the features that prevent erosion, before the market uncovers them or a competitor solves them first. That’s the difference between a product that reacts to complaints and one that anticipates them. Why customers rarely say what they truly need, and how the Value Proposition Canvas gets you there, is a topic in its own right that I cover separately.
The third lever is value stream design inside the company. Because the best customer insight comes to nothing if the organisation can’t act on it. Silos have to break open, conflicting goals have to dissolve, and everything has to align to value creation for the customer rather than departmental targets. This is a job customer experience can own, when it’s organised cross-functionally and across department lines along the customer journey and the value stream.
And that means value creation for the customer. Because the more value I create for them, the more likely they are to buy, to stay and to recommend. And the more customer delight arises, which I can put a price on. The value stick helps here as an image. At the top sits the customer’s willingness to pay, below it the price, at the very bottom the willingness to sell, which is anchored to cost. The gap between willingness to pay and price is the delight. Create more value and you push willingness to pay upward. And unlike willingness to sell, which is bounded below by cost, willingness to pay is theoretically open at the top. In practice it’s a diminishing function of utility, but the lever sits precisely there. Ownership quality doesn’t come from every department hitting its own target. It comes from a coherent system that owns the whole use and maximises value for the customer. How that works organisationally, why friction arises exactly at the handoffs between silos, is a topic of its own, and that’s what the next article is about.
What matters in the end
These three levers share one goal. They move the effort from where it does harm to where it belongs. Away from the customer’s everyday life, into the development of the product.
Customers stay because everyday use becomes effortless. Products mature because friction gets removed on purpose, instead of being offloaded into daily life. And companies grow when they design reasons to stay, not just reasons to buy.
That’s the real work. It’s unglamorous, it appears in no brochure, and it decides everything that comes after the purchase.