There’s a Cold War that runs through almost every product team. The frontline folks—designers, PMs, engineers—are quietly frustrated. “Management is completely disconnected from reality,” they mutter. “They don’t understand what our users actually need.”
Meanwhile, management is equally frustrated, just in different rooms. “Why don’t they understand that we have to make this happen? We’re competing in a marketplace. There are larger forces at play here.”
Both sides are right. That’s exactly the problem.
The frustration isn’t a people problem. It’s a perspective problem. Everyone is looking at the same situation through a different lens, and nobody’s translating between them.
The Three Levels You Have to Understand
Think of it like Powers of Ten. You can zoom in so close you see individual cells, or pull back until you’re looking at galaxies. Neither view is wrong—but they reveal completely different things.
Product people need to operate fluently at three levels:
The Market. This is the widest view—macro trends, behavioral shifts, psychographic patterns. Sometimes demographic, though honestly that’s usually the least useful lens. The market tells you what forces are shaping what people want and need, often before they can articulate it themselves.
The Industry. This is the middle layer. Who are the players? What are the competitive dynamics? What solutions already exist, and why are customers choosing them (or not)? Understanding your industry tells you where the real opportunities and threats live.
The Individual. These are your actual users—the specific humans with specific problems, workarounds, and mental models. The messy, idiosyncratic, very real people your product either serves or doesn’t.
Here’s the thing: you need all three. Miss one and your strategy floats free of reality, or your product solves problems that don’t matter at scale.
Where Things Go Wrong
Frontline teams fall in love with individuals. They’ve talked to users. They’ve sat with customer service. They’ve seen the real pain up close, and it’s hard to unsee. This is good! This is your job! But it can make it hard to zoom out and ask whether solving this particular pain point is the right strategic move, or whether the industry is shifting in a way that makes today’s problem irrelevant tomorrow.
Leadership tends to get stuck at the market level. They’re reading analyst reports, tracking competitors, watching the macro trends. All of that matters enormously. But somewhere in those slide decks, the actual humans can disappear. Markets aren’t abstract forces—they’re made of people. And people are weird and specific and don’t always behave the way trend lines suggest.
When these two perspectives collide without a shared framework, you get the Cold War described above. Both sides feel unseen. Neither is wrong. But you’re having a conversation across three levels of abstraction without realizing it.
What To Do About It
If you’re in the trenches: zoom out deliberately. Block some time to do competitive analysis. What are your direct and indirect competitors doing? Where is the industry heading? Subscribe to a couple of solid industry analysis sources and actually read them. You don’t have to become a strategist overnight, but you should understand the larger forces that determine whether your work matters at scale.
If you’re in management: go watch a usability test. Seriously. Put it on your calendar. Sit in on a customer call. Get into a room—physical or virtual—with an actual user doing an actual thing with your product. Not a summary. Not a report. The real thing. You will be surprised what you see. The market is made of human beings, and you need to remember that regularly.
For everyone: practice translating across levels. When you bring an insight up, give it context—is this an individual quirk, an industry pattern, or a market shift? When strategy comes down, ask which level it’s operating at and what evidence from the other two levels supports it.
The goal isn’t for everyone to see everything at once. It’s to understand which level you’re standing at and be able to move between them—so that when your team is frustrated with management, or management is baffled by the team, you have a language for why, and a path toward working it out.
Written with, but not by, Claude.ai