“We know what our customer wants”
Even though nobody asked them. Why companies build an imaginary customer instead of the real one – and how to run a customer conversation that tells you something.
Václav Duda25 May 2026 · 3 min read
Fire them as soon as you can.
If you run a company or develop products, they probably work for you. They are not on the org chart and draw no salary, yet they reliably wreck months of development and burn through millions. In Czech their names are puns: SeTo (“it’ll get done”), SaMo (“it’ll sort itself out”) and PakŇák (“we’ll figure it out somehow, later”). Let’s call them Gets-Done, Sorts-Itself and Somehow-Later. If you do not get rid of them quickly, your product ends up in a dead end.
They usually show up as a launch approaches. The development team is finishing the code or the production run, and the whole company is focused on one thing only: making the core functionality work and delivering the final product. There is no time left for anything else.
And so things start to happen. Who will set up the link to accounting so the right invoices go out? That will get done somehow. Who tells the salespeople what to offer customers, and what? What should marketing shout to the world, and at whom? Who trains customer support, and how? That will sort itself out. And how exactly do we deliver the product to the first paying client? We will figure that out somehow, later – let’s just start selling.
Companies often fall for the “once we have sold it, we will somehow deliver it” approach. But it has fatal consequences for day-to-day reality.
The moment the product meets its first real customer, the illusion collapses. The customer gets a great feature, but no contract arrives, support cannot help and delivery takes far too long. Your star salesperson, who should be out selling, suddenly becomes an internal chaser – running around the company finding out where the order got stuck and apologising to an angry client.
And that is exactly when the boss of our invisible trio walks on stage. His name is SEP – Somebody Else’s Problem.
When the search for a culprit begins, development and the product team wash their hands of it. The app does not crash; the vacuum cleaner sucks. The invoice did not go out, or the salesperson has no price list? That is not a product issue – that is Somebody Else’s Problem. Buck-passing gets the green light.
If you do not want these gentlemen running your company, you have to think around the corner – when developing a product and when introducing any change in the company. It is not only about the product itself, but about the whole system around it.
How to fire them
1. Define the MVP of the whole launch, not just of the product. A minimum viable product does not just mean trimmed-down functionality. It also means defining what sales absolutely needs in order to sell, which legal terms must be written and who must be trained before you go live. Be clear about what has to be ready now and what can genuinely wait.
2. Draw the backbone process. You do not need complex diagrams straight away. But you must know exactly what happens, step by step, when a customer says “I’ll buy it”. How does the order flow through the company? Who approves it? Who invoices it? Who delivers it, physically or digitally? Where are the bottlenecks?
3. Hand out clear roles. Kill the SEP department at birth. Every step in the backbone process needs a specific owner. When a salesperson closes a deal, they must not turn into the delivery project manager. Their job ends at the signature; then someone else has to take over smoothly.
4. Share information from one place. There is nothing worse than product specifications and process manuals scattered across emails, chats and personal drives. Create one central place where everyone can find how the product works and how non-standard situations are handled. Production must know what sales promised, and sales must know when production will deliver.
5. Make a checklist. There are many things to think of for any given product. Long before launch, list everything that must be ready for go-live and everything that can come a little later – across processes, legal, sales and marketing readiness, finance readiness and so on. That way you avoid discovering you forgot something only when a furious customer calls.
Gets-Done, Sorts-Itself and Somehow-Later are just a cover for unfinished management. Fire them before they poison your customers and your own team.
Translated from the Czech original, first published on Václav Duda’s Substack Produktový management prakticky.
