The Whispering Competitor
I was wearing a Samsung shirt.
Not a metaphor. It was 2008, I'd just arrived in Australia, hadn't landed a teaching job yet, and needed work. So I took what was available: casual brand rep at Harvey Norman in Nunawading. My job was to stand next to a row of new Samsung televisions and tell people about them.
I was not a salesperson. The salespeople made that very clear.
In my first week, one of them came over and started asking me about the TVs. What made them different. What the technology was doing that last year's model couldn't. I thought he was curious - a fellow technologist, maybe, interested in the specs for their own sake.
So I told him. Panel type, refresh rate, upscaling. A human version of the spec sheet.
He listened. And then his face did something I didn't understand at the time.
He looked disappointed. Not rude about it. Just... done. He thanked me and walked away.
I stood there in my branded shirt and had no idea what I'd said wrong.
It took me a while to work it out. He wasn't asking because he cared about the technology. He was asking because he needed to understand the person who was about to walk through the door - the one who'd driven to Nunawading on a Saturday with a vague sense that the TV in the lounge was getting old. What did that person care about? Screen size, probably. Whether it would fit the wall unit. Whether the price felt like a reasonable exchange for the upgrade.
Not refresh rate.
My mistake wasn't that I didn't know the product. I knew the product fine. My mistake was that I didn't have a model of the customer who already existed - the one arriving with their own life, their own lounge room, their own perfectly adequate television that wasn't broken yet.
They didn't come with empty hands. And I hadn't even thought to ask what they were carrying.
A few years later I was building a portal for coaches to record their session notes in. This was a bit earlier in my dev career, and I was genuinely excited about it. Note capture was a solved problem, technically. I had ideas. Clean UI, structured fields, searchable history. Taxonomies! Everything a well-designed notes tool should have.
What I hadn't done was watch a coach actually take notes.
They wrote by hand. Of course they did. The pen kept pace with the conversation in a way that no UI ever will - no loading states, no required fields, no moment where you have to look away from the person in front of you to find the right input. Their notebooks weren't a problem waiting to be solved. They were a solution, refined over years of practice, that fit the specific shape of how they worked.
My portal was technically fine. It was just competing with something that had already won.
And here's the thing I didn't understand then, but do now: the notebook wasn't just convenient. It was theirs. The coach had built it, incrementally, session by session, into something that fit them. They hadn't waited for me to come along and design their workflow. They'd designed it themselves, without me, and it worked.
When I showed them my solution, there was a voice they could hear that I couldn't.
Why would we need that, though? It's easier to just jot things down. I don't want to be locked into a system I didn't design.
That's the whispering competitor. It doesn't show up in your market research. It doesn't have a product page or a pricing tier. It's the spreadsheet, the notebook, the workaround that's been running quietly in the background for years. It sits on your prospective user's shoulder while you demo your product and quietly, reasonably, asks why they'd bother.
In edtech (where I work now) this whisper is loud.
Teachers have been solving their own problems for years. Decades, some of them. They've built systems out of whatever was available: spreadsheets held together with conditional formatting and institutional memory, folder structures with naming conventions that only make sense to them, workflows that accomplish in seconds what your feature takes three taps and a loading spinner to do.
Walk into any primary school classroom and there's an 85% chance you'll see two cans of popsicle sticks on the teacher's desk. Names written on each stick. Left can: kids who haven't been called on yet. Right can: kids who have. When the left runs empty, the cans swap. No app. No algorithm. No friction. Just a solution a teachers designed themselves, refined over years, that does the job in a gesture.
That's the whispering competitor.
And every new tool that promises to replace it is also asking for something in return - the learning curve, the migration, the period of being slower before you're faster, the loss of fluency that took years to build. That cost is real. It just doesn't show up in the product spec.
We find greenfield builds easy because there's no accumulated technical debt to work around. But it's rare that a new product is actually for greenfield users. Most of the time we're building for people who've been solving the problem already, in their own way, with whatever was to hand. And the honest question - the one I didn't think to ask in Harvey Norman, the one I didn't ask the coaches - is have we understood what we're actually asking them to give up?
I don't think the answer is to stop building. Obviously. But there's a version of product thinking that takes the whispering competitor seriously as a design input - that tries to understand not just the problem the user has, but the solution they already have, and what it would genuinely take to earn the right to replace it.
Not every existing solution deserves to survive. Sometimes the old way really is just painful and people will be glad to leave it behind. But the ones who are slower to move have usually been burned before. They're not waiting to be convinced by your feature list. They're waiting to see if you've actually understood them.
The whispering competitor has. That's why it's still there.
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