You Have to Feel It

TLDR

• Shipping to spec is not enough; the emotional experience of using your work is itself a requirement.

Key Takeaways

• Checked boxes, met schedules, and passed demos do not capture whether a feature feels right to the person using it daily.
• Every interaction with your work evokes a feeling: frustration, joy, relief, confidence. That feeling is part of the deliverable.
• The signal that something is done is personal: you want to use it again, it fits naturally, you want to tell others about it.
• You cannot validate the feeling through metrics or specifications alone. You have to sit with the work and use it yourself.

Why It Matters

• Builders optimizing for output signals (velocity, demos, requirements coverage) can consistently miss the dimension that determines whether users return.
• For people who live inside a product daily, the cumulative emotional texture of the experience outweighs any single feature’s spec compliance.
• Founders and operators who skip personal use of their own product lose the fastest feedback loop available for catching this gap.

Mitchell Hashimoto · 2025-08-30 · Read the original