Anthropologist Gillian Tett noticed something strange while studying financial institutions before the 2008 crash: the teams most confident in their models were the ones most siloed from the people those models were supposed to represent. They had stopped being curious about the gap between their map and the territory. Product teams do the same thing — not through arrogance, but through the quiet accumulation of internal language and inherited assumptions that slowly replace actual contact with users. The Pragmatist philosopher William James called this 'the psychologist's fallacy': assuming that your description of an experience is the same as the experience itself. In product terms, it's the moment 'user frustration' on a dashboard stops feeling like someone actually frustrated. One corrective is embarrassingly simple — not a framework, just a habit: read one raw, unedited user message before any meeting where you'll be talking about users. Not a summary. The actual words, in the actual syntax someone used when something wasn't working.

When did you last feel genuinely surprised by something a user said or did — and what had you assumed before that moment?

Drawing from Pragmatism — William James