Care requires conflict
Why consensus kills great products
I stared at the mockup. Garbage. But everyone smiled and nodded. Clean layout, on-brand colors, clear CTA. Engineering had thumbs-up’d the timeline. The designer was ecstatic.
The headline was generic. The flow clunky. Users would bounce in seconds. But the meeting ran long, and I’d already pushed back twice that week.
I stayed quiet. We shipped garbage.
Real care demands ruining consensus. It’s pushing for the eighth iteration when seven felt fine. Rejecting code that works but isn’t elegant. Delaying launches because “good enough” never actually is.
Most choose collaboration over conflict; they chase glowing performance reviews. But consensus breeds mediocrity, not breakthroughs.
You can spot the “fake” care instantly. They preach excellence but approve whatever lands in their inbox. One pushback and they fold: “Fine for v1.” “We can iterate later.” “Users won’t notice.”
Real care is truly exhausting. The founders I admire set impossible standards, and then demand perfect execution. They’ll scrap weeks of work for details few will ever see. While their teams celebrate shipping, they’re already three iterations ahead, unsatisfied until it’s right.
At Opendoor, we stopped emailing customers after two years. Seemed logical, who sells a home after that long? When we finally questioned this assumption, contracts doubled overnight. A billion dollars hidden behind one uncomfortable conversation nobody wanted to have.
Products die in that silence. Not from lack of talent, but because nobody fought when it mattered. The code works, so ship it. The design looks fine, so launch it. Meanwhile, competitors obsess over details you ignored.
This isn’t difficulty for its own sake. Effective friction challenges ideas, not people. Great teams normalize this conflict. “That’s not good enough” becomes a rallying cry, not a personal attack.
Most avoid conflict because harmony feels easier. They mistake agreement for progress. But shipping something worth using means someone must speak when everyone else wants to move on.
Your customers will thank you. Your team might not. Do it anyway.
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Thanks for the insight post. I couldn’t agree more with your phrase, “Real care is truly exhausting.” To add: in my experience, exhaustion comes because, most of the time, product people care about it alone in corporations where the product mindset is not a core value.