Every product team has a mental image of their user. The problem is that this image tends to be assembled from existing data; who are currently buying, what they currently do, what they currently say they need. That is a reasonable starting point. However, it becomes a dangerous one the moment the team mistakes it for the whole picture. Companies that design exclusively for the user they have, tend to produce increasingly refined solutions to (eventually) increasingly irrelevant problems.
They optimize well, right up until the horizon shifts, and then they find themselves with no vocabulary for what comes next.
Kodak is perhaps the most instructive casualty of this pattern. At its peak, the company controlled nearly 90% of the US film market, and spent its energy serving those users with extraordinary diligence. What it failed to reckon with was that one of its own engineers had already invented the digital camera in 1975.
Rather than pursuing that invention, Kodak’s leadership held back, unwilling to risk cannibalizing a profitable film business.
Competitors who had no such attachment to the old model moved in, and Kodak eventually filed for bankruptcy in 2012. The tragedy isn’t that Kodak didn’t see the future coming, it’s that they invented it, and then looked away. Nokia followed a remarkably similar arc. In 2007, Nokia controlled 50% of the global mobile phone market. By 2013, that figure had collapsed to 3%.
The company had built its Symbian operating system for the pre-smartphone era, and rather than acknowledge that the code was dying, it kept churning out new hardware models to meet immediate demand, a form of short-term thinking that researchers later described as temporal myopia.
Nokia’s users loved their phones. Nokia kept building better ones. And completely missed that their users had stopped caring about phones and started caring about ecosystems.
I saw a version of this play out closer to home, some years ago, with an investee company in the ride space, close second in fleet size nationally, and notably more profitable than the market leader. They were doing the sensible thing: optimizing operations, steadily building a fleet-partner model. From the inside, it must have looked like momentum. What it was, in retrospect, was refinement without reinvention. When Uber and Ola arrived with a purely asset-light, third-party model, the game changed overnight, not gradually, but completely. Both companies still exist, but as shadows of what they could have been had they disrupted themselves before someone else did the disrupting for them.
The tension between serving the user you have and courting the user you want plays out at every scale, including, as I was reminded recently, at a petrol bunk near me. There was a tyre-filling attendant who cycled through the queue that had a few regulars waiting. When someone in a larger car pulled up in a hurry and pushed in, he accommodated them, perhaps feeling the pressure of the moment, perhaps miscalculating where the real value lay. It’s a small thing, but it mirrors a dynamic I’ve seen in management meetings more times than I can count: the existing customer, moderate but steady, quietly de-prioritized in favour of the flashier, higher-potential prospect. There’s no clean answer to that balance, new segments matter, and urgency is real. But one of the older attendants at that same station simply held the queue, regardless of who was asking. It wasn’t a grand gesture. But it offered something underrated: predictability, and the quiet dignity of being treated as someone whose time also matters. That, too, is product thinking. The basics of process and fairness don’t resolve the strategic tension, but they prevent you from hemorrhaging the loyalty you already have while chasing the loyalty you haven’t yet earned.
The right place to stand is always between the user you have and the user you could have or want; one foot grounded in current behaviour, one foot gauging how to bridge the gap or where that behaviour is quietly heading. Optimisation serves today’s user. But it’s the peripheral vision, the willingness to ask who else might need this, or what this same user might need next, that determines whether a product has a future or merely a present.
These are the kinds of questions I explore with product leaders and co-founders in my virtual strategy sessions. If any of this has struck a chord, I’d be glad to hear about what you’re working on. [https://www.productinnovator.in/consult]