---
type: "article"
title: "The expensive way to learn"
summary: "I spent the first few years of my career getting very good at solving problems I increasingly wished we had found earlier.\nI was a quality engineer in Quebec, and when something went wrong with a product, there was no shortage of urgency. The product was already being used, a customer had a real problem, the business needed answers, and we needed to understand exactly what had happened and make sure it did not happen again. Give me a complicated problem where the first explanation did not quite make sense, and I could happily disappear into it. I wanted the data, the engineering, the process, the customer experience, all the different versions of what people thought had happened, and somewhere inside all of that was usually the actual answer.\nThere was something incredibly satisfying about finally finding it. But after doing this for a while, I started having one fairly irritating thought.\nWhy are we learning this now?\nBy the time we were asking some of our best questions, the product had already been designed, built, launched, and put into a customer’s hands. Now we were intensely interested in what the customer had experienced, what they had expected, how they were actually using the product, what had gone wrong, and why our assumptions didn’t match reality.\nI kept wondering…\nWhat would happen if we put some of that energy into understanding those things earlier?\nWhat if we spent more time with customers before we built the product?\nWhat if we understood how they worked, what frustrated them, what mattered to them, and what problem they really needed us to solve before we got terribly attached to our answer?\nAround the same time, I gave a presentation on a fairly complicated quality situation we were navigating. A VP of Marketing named Kevin happened to be in the audience, and afterward he came up to me and said, “If you ever want a job in marketing, give me a call.”\nThis was not an obvious career suggestion at the time.\nI was an electrical engineer working in quality. I had never worked in marketing and had no grand plan to become a marketer. I remember being pleased that he thought I might be good at it, and then I went back to my actual job.\nFour to six months later, my assignment in Quebec was coming to an end, and the company offered me a promotion to Senior Quality Engineer. I had worked hard for it. I was doing well, and it made complete sense, but I remember thinking about the new role and feeling bored.\nNot because I was bored with solving problems; I loved that part. I was bored by the thought of spending the next few years getting even better at solving them after the product was already out there. I wanted to be closer to the customer before we built something. I wanted to understand what they needed, what we should build and why, and whether the thing we were excited about inside the company actually solved something useful outside it.\nSo on a random Friday afternoon I picked up the phone to Kevin and said, “Hey Kevin, you told me that if I ever wanted a job in marketing I should give you a call. This is that call.”\nThat was how I ended up in marketing.\nWhen I tell people this story now, they usually stop me at the same place.\n“Wait, you were an engineer?”\nThe move from engineering into marketing tends to become the interesting part of the story. Looking backward, I can certainly make it sound very intentional. I moved into product marketing, launched products around the world, worked through acquisitions, built and led global teams, and spent much of the next two decades getting closer to customers and the commercial side of businesses.\nCareers become remarkably easy to explain once you already know how they turned out.\nWhat interests me much more now is the question that was already bothering me before I had any idea where my career was going.\nWhy are we learning this now?\nI see versions of it in businesses all the time.\n\nA product launches and customers do not respond the way everyone expected, and suddenly we get very interested in talking to them.\nThe sales team misses the number, and now we want to understand whether customers actually care about what we are selling, whether sales believes the story they have been asked to tell, and whether the pipeline was ever as healthy as everyone thought it was.\nAn acquisition closes, and months later people start asking very specific questions about how the two businesses are supposed to work together, who owns what, where customers overlap and what exactly “integration” was meant to look like.\nA senior hire does not work out, and suddenly everyone can describe, in remarkable detail, what the role actually needed.\n\nNone of this means those decisions were bad or that we could have predicted every problem. Markets move, customers surprise us, and people behave differently than we expected. Strategies that looked sensible with the information available at the time sometimes simply do not work. Sometimes you genuinely could not have known.\nWhat I find more interesting are the times when we could have known or at least known enough to ask a better question.\nBecause something changes once the problem becomes expensive.\nWe find the time to call the customers.\nWe pull apart the pipeline instead of discussing the number at the top of it.\nWe put sales, marketing, and product in the same room and make everyone explain what they are actually seeing.\nWe talk to the people closest to the work.\nWe go back to assumptions that sailed through three previous meetings and ask whether they were ever true.\nThe questions were available before, but the urgency around answering them wasn’t.\nI recognize that because I spent years on the other end of it. As a quality engineer, I was trained to go into a problem once reality had told us something was wrong and understand exactly what had happened. I still love doing that; I have just become much more interested in whether we can ask some of those questions while there is still time to change the decision.\nThat starts with looking at what you are scrambling to understand now.\nIf a product is struggling and you are suddenly spending hours talking to customers, what are they telling you that would have been useful six months ago?\nIf the pipeline has fallen apart and you are finally examining every opportunity, what are you discovering that the headline number kept you from seeing?\nIf an integration is stuck and everyone is now arguing about ownership, what did you assume would somehow sort itself out after the deal closed?\nThen there is a second question, and I think this is the one that matters more.\nWhere else are we making a decision today without that information?\nBecause fixing the immediate problem is only part of the value of learning something late.\nA weak product launch can teach you how well your company understands customers before it decides what to build.\nA missed quarter can tell you something about how easily a room can accept a pipeline number without understanding what sits underneath it.\nA difficult integration can expose assumptions that are probably sitting inside the next acquisition plan too.\nThe useful part is not writing those things into a lessons-learned document six months later. It is getting them into a decision that has not been made yet.\nSo the next time everyone in a room is working furiously to understand what went wrong, stay there a few more minutes before fixing it and moving on.\nAsk:\n\nWhat do we know now that we wish we had known earlier?\nWhat made us finally go looking for it?\nWhere else would knowing this now change a decision we have not made yet?\n\nYou cannot change when you learned it the first time.\nYou can make sure you don’t learn it late twice.\nUntil the next room,\nArchita\nRead the full note on readysetbold.com →"
newsletter: "The Room — notes by Archita Fritz"
newsletter_handle: "readysetbold"
newsletter_url: "https://usecommune.com/n/readysetbold"
author: "Archita Fritz (@archita)"
published: "2026-08-23T00:00:00.000Z"
canonical_url: "https://usecommune.com/n/readysetbold/a/the-expensive-way-to-learn"
markdown_url: "https://usecommune.com/n/readysetbold/a/the-expensive-way-to-learn.md"
chat_url: "https://usecommune.com/n/readysetbold/a/the-expensive-way-to-learn/chat"
source_url: "https://www.readysetbold.com/the-room/issue-006"
body_source: "imported"
likes: 2
replies: 3
body_words: 1375
---

# The expensive way to learn

I spent the first few years of my career getting very good at solving problems I increasingly wished we had found earlier.

I was a quality engineer in Quebec, and when something went wrong with a product, there was no shortage of urgency. The product was already being used, a customer had a real problem, the business needed answers, and we needed to understand exactly what had happened and make sure it did not happen again. Give me a complicated problem where the first explanation did not quite make sense, and I could happily disappear into it. I wanted the data, the engineering, the process, the customer experience, all the different versions of what people thought had happened, and somewhere inside all of that was usually the actual answer.

There was something incredibly satisfying about finally finding it. But after doing this for a while, I started having one fairly irritating thought.

> *Why are we learning this now?*

By the time we were asking some of our best questions, the product had already been designed, built, launched, and put into a customer’s hands. Now we were intensely interested in what the customer had experienced, what they had expected, how they were actually using the product, what had gone wrong, and why our assumptions didn’t match reality.

I kept wondering…

What would happen if we put some of that energy into understanding those things earlier?

What if we spent more time with customers before we built the product?

What if we understood how they worked, what frustrated them, what mattered to them, and what problem they really needed us to solve before we got terribly attached to our answer?

Around the same time, I gave a presentation on a fairly complicated quality situation we were navigating. A VP of Marketing named Kevin happened to be in the audience, and afterward he came up to me and said, “If you ever want a job in marketing, give me a call.”

This was not an obvious career suggestion at the time.

I was an electrical engineer working in quality. I had never worked in marketing and had no grand plan to become a marketer. I remember being pleased that he thought I might be good at it, and then I went back to my actual job.

Four to six months later, my assignment in Quebec was coming to an end, and the company offered me a promotion to Senior Quality Engineer. I had worked hard for it. I was doing well, and it made complete sense, but I remember thinking about the new role and feeling bored.

Not because I was bored with solving problems; I loved that part. I was bored by the thought of spending the next few years getting even better at solving them after the product was already out there. I wanted to be closer to the customer before we built something. I wanted to understand what they needed, what we should build and why, and whether the thing we were excited about inside the company actually solved something useful outside it.

So on a random Friday afternoon I picked up the phone to Kevin and said, “Hey Kevin, you told me that if I ever wanted a job in marketing I should give you a call. This is that call.”

That was how I ended up in marketing.

When I tell people this story now, they usually stop me at the same place.

“Wait, you were an engineer?”

The move from engineering into marketing tends to become the interesting part of the story. Looking backward, I can certainly make it sound very intentional. I moved into product marketing, launched products around the world, worked through acquisitions, built and led global teams, and spent much of the next two decades getting closer to customers and the commercial side of businesses.

> *Careers become remarkably easy to explain once you already know how they turned out.*

What interests me much more now is the question that was already bothering me before I had any idea where my career was going.

Why are we learning this now?

I see versions of it in businesses all the time.

1. A product launches and customers do not respond the way everyone expected, and suddenly we get very interested in talking to them.
2. The sales team misses the number, and now we want to understand whether customers actually care about what we are selling, whether sales believes the story they have been asked to tell, and whether the pipeline was ever as healthy as everyone thought it was.
3. An acquisition closes, and months later people start asking very specific questions about how the two businesses are supposed to work together, who owns what, where customers overlap and what exactly “integration” was meant to look like.
4. A senior hire does not work out, and suddenly everyone can describe, in remarkable detail, what the role actually needed.

None of this means those decisions were bad or that we could have predicted every problem. Markets move, customers surprise us, and people behave differently than we expected. Strategies that looked sensible with the information available at the time sometimes simply do not work. Sometimes you genuinely could not have known.

What I find more interesting are the times when we could have known or at least known enough to ask a better question.

Because something changes once the problem becomes expensive.

We find the time to call the customers.

We pull apart the pipeline instead of discussing the number at the top of it.

We put sales, marketing, and product in the same room and make everyone explain what they are actually seeing.

We talk to the people closest to the work.

We go back to assumptions that sailed through three previous meetings and ask whether they were ever true.

> *The questions were available before, but the urgency around answering them wasn’t.*

I recognize that because I spent years on the other end of it. As a quality engineer, I was trained to go into a problem once reality had told us something was wrong and understand exactly what had happened. I still love doing that; I have just become much more interested in whether we can ask some of those questions while there is still time to change the decision.

That starts with looking at what you are scrambling to understand now.

If a product is struggling and you are suddenly spending hours talking to customers, what are they telling you that would have been useful six months ago?

If the pipeline has fallen apart and you are finally examining every opportunity, what are you discovering that the headline number kept you from seeing?

If an integration is stuck and everyone is now arguing about ownership, what did you assume would somehow sort itself out after the deal closed?

Then there is a second question, and I think this is the one that matters more.

> *Where else are we making a decision today without that information?*

Because fixing the immediate problem is only part of the value of learning something late.

A weak product launch can teach you how well your company understands customers before it decides what to build.

A missed quarter can tell you something about how easily a room can accept a pipeline number without understanding what sits underneath it.

A difficult integration can expose assumptions that are probably sitting inside the next acquisition plan too.

The useful part is not writing those things into a lessons-learned document six months later. It is getting them into a decision that has not been made yet.

So the next time everyone in a room is working furiously to understand what went wrong, stay there a few more minutes before fixing it and moving on.

Ask:

1. What do we know now that we wish we had known earlier?
2. What made us finally go looking for it?
3. Where else would knowing this now change a decision we have not made yet?

You cannot change when you learned it the first time.

> *You can make sure you don’t learn it late twice.*

Until the next room,
Archita

[Read the full note on readysetbold.com →](https://www.readysetbold.com/the-room/issue-006)

***

## Discussion (3 replies)

Numbering shows the reply tree: `2.1` is a reply to `2`. Message text is reproduced verbatim as posted.

### 1. Steven Willmott (@njyx) - 2026-08-23T15:10:42.860Z

Great post... I'd even add one thing -> when in Q&A and product you only have one lever : fix the product. But actually it may be another lever that's wrong -> the wrong type of user. That's one of the best things to learn about early!

### 2. Archita Fritz (@archita) - 2026-08-24T06:55:54.250Z

Thank you for adding that insight Steven. Know who your customer is and learn early and fast. And then keep paying attention, because sometimes the way your customer uses your product evolves and makes way for a new type of customer too.

### 3. Steven Willmott (@njyx) - 2026-08-24T11:55:59.859Z

Yes definitely! I also didn't mean it was the user's fault that they were wrong. Just that sometimes marketing messages target a buyer we think we want, but that's not actually who the product is best suited for.