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Field Noe #067 | The Distance Paradox: When Devotion to the Build Blinds You to the User
Description
Indifference is easy to spot in a poorly made product. The harder failures to diagnose are the ones caused by devotion.
In Field Note #08, we examine The Distance Paradox: caring intensely about the work requires emotional intimacy, but objective evaluation requires emotional distance. When engineers, designers, and operators spend months solving difficult internal problems, their familiarity compresses complex workarounds into effortless habits . They begin subsidising the product with their own memory during internal tests.
We grew close to the product. We lost sight of the user.
This episode traces how internal technical compromises quietly transform into external user friction, why asking builders to "think like beginners" rarely works in practice, and how a simple ten-minute silent review can expose the assumptions your team has stopped noticing .
Before your next release, ask: What must a stranger already know about our internal constraints for this decision to make sense?
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