The Dogfooding Blind Spot

The Idea

Onboarding is worth designing carefully right now — everyone is dogfooding their products, which is good, but past a threshold it destroys the empathy it's supposed to build. Builders stop seeing the product as new users do. Every shortcut, every convention, every "obvious" flow is only obvious because they've internalized it. The more you use your own product, the more invisible the friction becomes to you.

This isn't an AI-specific problem — it's a speed problem. When everyone's shipping daily, the product evolves faster than the onboarding does. The gap between power-user experience and new-user experience widens silently.

The Fix: Parallel Tracks

Both should happen simultaneously:

• Build for power users (including yourself)
• Design for new users who have zero context

These aren't sequential — they're parallel. Maybe it's worth having someone dedicated to holding the "I know nothing" perspective while the rest of the team is deep in the product. A permanent new-user proxy.

When to Start Focusing on New Users

No single trigger, but heuristics:

• Activation rate drop — sign-up → "aha moment" conversion declining even as traffic grows. Early users are forgiving; later cohorts aren't.
• Support pattern shift — questions change from "how do I do X?" to "what does this even do?"
• The friend test — can someone you haven't briefed use the product without messaging you?
• Growth channel shift — moving from word-of-mouth (warm intros who get it) to broader distribution (content, ads, launches). Those users arrive with zero context.

Session Replays as Antidote

Watching how real new users use the product is the direct counter to the blind spot. Borrowed eyes at scale. But most founders know they should watch replays and don't — is it friction (tooling), habit (no ritual), or priorities (shipping feels more productive)?

If it's habit/ritual, there's a product opportunity: surface the "new user is confused" signal without requiring hours of replay watching. The insight comes to you, you don't go looking for it.

Related

• The Builder's Curse: Making AI-Built Systems Understandable — adjacent: AI-built systems being hard for users to understand. This thought extends it to human builders losing empathy through daily use.