Headless Chickens

Every product team has its version of the emergency siren. A dashboard line dips, a KPI flashes red, and suddenly the war room fills with people running in circles, armed with sticky notes and slide decks. Engagement is down? Quick—ship a new notification system. Retention is softening? Time to rebundle features into a shiny “Plus” tier. Conversion rates dropping? Spin up a flash sale, splash banners across the site, and call it a growth hack.

The metrics look better for a while. Clicks spike. Sign-ups nudge upward. Somebody gets congratulated in the all-hands. And yet, nothing fundamental has changed. The product still wobbles at its core. The team has dressed the wound without asking what caused the bleeding.

This is the problem with treating metrics as destinations instead of trail markers. Numbers like retention, engagement, or completion rates are rarely the problem itself—they are symptoms. Useful, yes, but only if you treat them as the starting point of an investigation, not the finish line. Otherwise you get the illusion of progress: movement without direction, like a flock of headless chickens.

The antidote isn’t more dashboards or cleverer experiments. It’s a return to first principles: products and services exist to solve problems for people. That’s the reason they earn attention, trust, and eventually money. If you can’t regularly answer the question “What problem are we solving right now, and how well?” then no amount of sales bundling or feature reshuffling will save you.

That’s where Hero and Hygiene thinking comes in. It’s a way of checking whether your product is meeting today’s standards of problem-solving—and whether you’re pushing far enough to create tomorrow’s.

The First Principle

Ryan Petersen, the founder of Flexport, built one of the most successful logistics companies of the last decade by living this idea. He wasn’t just moving containers—he was untangling a deeply inefficient system. Flexport didn’t win because it was “tech-enabled” or “data-driven” (though it was both). It won because Petersen kept asking: How do we actually solve the customer’s problem better than anyone else? Did he

Hero and Hygiene thinking forces the same question, but with a twist:

Hygiene tells you if you’re meeting today’s baseline for solving the problem.
Hero pushes you to create tomorrow’s baseline.

Hygiene: The Price of Entry

Hygiene is situational, time-bound, and always moving. What was acceptable ten years ago will get you laughed out of the market today. It’s the oxygen of your product—no one notices when it’s there, but they’ll leave instantly when it’s gone.

Here’s how hygiene standards have shifted across industries:

Industry	Hygiene Standard (2010)	Hygiene Standard (2025)
Restaurants	Dine-in service, takeaway if you had capacity	Full delivery operation (Uber Eats, Deliveroo, Swiggy), menu engineered for travel
E-commerce	7–10 day delivery, paid returns, minimal tracking	1–2 day delivery, free returns, real-time tracking
Hotels	Free continental breakfast, basic Wi-Fi (often paid)	High-speed free Wi-Fi, mobile check-in, 24/7 self-service concierge
Airlines	Email booking confirmation, basic in-flight entertainment	Mobile boarding passes, in-seat charging, personalised flight updates
Banking	Branch-centric services, phone banking	Instant mobile payments, real-time fraud alerts, app-based ID verification
Customer Support	9–5 call centre, email response in 24-48 hours	24/7 live chat, omnichannel support, AI-assisted instant help
Fitness	On-site classes and equipment	On-demand video workouts, app-integrated performance tracking

Hero: The Standout Move

If hygiene is your ticket to the game, Hero is how you win it.

Hero features are the moves that make people say, “You have to try this.” They create delight, loyalty, and word of mouth. They’re the reason customers tell friends about you, the reason they pick you over a cheaper competitor.

Here are some iconic Hero moves:

Product / Service	Hero Move at the Time	What Happened Next
Apple AirTags	Consumer-friendly, precise personal tracking	Raised baseline for personal item security
Netflix (DVD era)	Movies on demand, no late fees	Drove Blockbuster into bankruptcy
Nintendo / PlayStation	Personal gaming consoles bringing the arcade home	Video arcades collapsed
Dyson Vacuums	High-design, high-tech engineering for a mundane product	Created a premium vacuum market
Tesla	Over-the-air software updates for cars	Now expected in EVs, creeping into traditional cars
Spotify	On-demand streaming with massive music library	Set streaming as default consumption mode
Zoom	One-click video conferencing without heavy IT setup	Forced competitors to drastically simplify onboarding
Airbnb	Stay in someone’s home, anywhere in the world	Shook up the hotel industry – redefined what “accommodation” means
Flexport	Real-time visibility into global shipments	Made shipment transparency a baseline expectation

The Dance Between the Two

Think of hygiene as oxygen—unseen but vital. Hero is the spark—visible, exciting, but it can’t burn without oxygen.

The dynamic plays out like this:

A company launches a Hero feature.
Competitors copy it.
Customers start expecting it everywhere.
The Hero becomes Hygiene. New reality created.
The cycle starts again.

The trap? It’s not about keeping up with Joneses; it’s about improving how you solve your customers problems.

Using Hero & Hygiene in Practice

This isn’t just an abstract exercise—It is a framework and tool that you can slot directly into your workflow. If you’ve read this far and you’re interested I’ve made a practical worksheet you can use in strategy sessions to clarify today’s hygiene, identify tomorrow’s hero moves, and align your team around purposeful innovation.

Because the companies that win aren’t the ones chasing metrics.
They’re the ones reshaping the problems worth solving.

Here is a link to the worksheet post.