You're here when: You've received feedback, from a conversation, a support ticket, a sales call, and you need to know if it's real signal or noise.
The Heuristic
Apply the Compliment vs. Commitment test. After every conversation, ask: did I leave with a compliment or a commitment?
- Compliments cost nothing. "That's awesome." "I'd totally use that." "You should definitely build this." These are polite reactions, not data.
- Commitments cost something. The person gave up time (a follow-up meeting), reputation (an introduction to their boss), or money (a deposit, LOI, budget allocation). The more they gave up, the more real the signal.
- Past beats future. "I would use this" is speculation. "Last Tuesday I spent two hours doing this manually" is evidence.
- Their life beats your idea. If the conversation was mostly about your solution, you got a reaction. If it was about their problem, you got data.
- Discomfort is a good sign. If you left feeling great, you probably got told what you wanted to hear. Good discovery conversations feel slightly uncomfortable.
Decision Tree
Quick Example
A founder pitched a finance tool to five small business owners. All five said "that's really cool, I'd use that." Zero agreed to a follow-up meeting with their accountant present. The founder treated five compliments as five validations. It was zero. Six months later, nobody signed up. The encouraging conversations produced no commitments, only polite fiction.
Watch What They Do, Not What They Say
Des Traynor (Intercom) makes a sharp distinction: listen to the customer's behavior, not their words. Words are opinions. Behavior is data. If a customer says "I need a calendar feature" but their actual workflow shows they're copy-pasting dates into spreadsheets, the job isn't "calendar," it's "not lose track of deadlines." Traynor's team at Intercom applies Jobs-to-be-Done thinking to feedback: instead of taking requests at face value, they ask what progress the customer is trying to make. The request is a symptom. The job is the diagnosis. This reframes feedback from "should we build what they asked for?" to "what's the underlying job, and is our product the right shape to do it?"
The Anti-Pattern
The Zombie Lead. Someone who keeps saying encouraging things but never commits:
- They take meetings and nod along
- They say "let's keep in touch"
- They never introduce you to anyone, never trial, never pay
Zombie leads are dangerous because they feel like a pipeline. Give them a concrete chance to reject you: "Can I send you an invoice for the pilot?" A clear no is worth more than an indefinite maybe.
Written with ❤️ by a human (still)