Weigh What Each Function Sees Well and Systematically Misses
The Sensor Map
Companion to You Are Not the User · Updated 2026-09-29
Use this when you need to weigh what each internal function tells you about users, knowing what each one sees well and what it systematically misses. Started in “Customer-Facing Teams Rarely See the People Who Use the Software,” completed in “Knowing the Subject Doesn’t Make Someone a Typical User.”
The Sensor Map, with its fixed biases and two columns for this month’s reports.
| Sensor | Sees well | Systematically misses | What it reported this month | Label (level and distance) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Customer Success | Relationships, renewal risk, account politics, the buyer’s mood | Normal daily work, users who never talk to CS | ||
| Support | Failures, errors, confusion severe enough to call about | The denominator, normal work, problems people work around silently | ||
| Sales | Buyer objections, RFP requirements, competitive claims | Production behavior, users who weren’t in the demo | ||
| Internal clinician or subject-matter expert | Domain rules, clinical safety, vocabulary | Other roles’ work, other practices’ variation, current frontline conditions | ||
| Product and Design | The product’s model, the roadmap, interaction patterns | First-time use, what the interface means to someone who didn’t design it | ||
| Engineering and QA | Whether the software meets its specification | Whether the specification describes the work | ||
| Executives | Strategy, market, money | Repetitive daily friction |
Put each report next to the column of things that sensor misses. A report that falls inside its sensor’s blind spot (Customer Success describing normal daily work, Support describing how often a task goes fine) needs a second source before anyone acts on it.