n o ren
Building & Strategy

Deeper Knowledge, Poorer Product Positioning

In 1990, a Stanford experiment found tappers overestimated listeners’ ability to guess songs — by 17 times.

2026-07-081 min read

The curse of knowledge — the cognitive bias that makes experts struggle to imagine ignorance — creates a silent trap for product teams. When founders and engineers master their product’s intricacies, they assume users share that clarity, leading to misjudged positioning and messaging. In Elizabeth Newton’s 1990 study, “students paid to tap out melodies like ‘Jingle Bells’ while guessing how often listeners would recognize the tune.” Tappers expected listeners to guess correctly 50% of the time. In reality, they succeeded just 3% of the time. The gap wasn’t a communication failure in tapping but a blind spot from knowing the song. Product teams repeat this: they design for how they see the product, not how first-time users perceive it.

This mechanism is deadly in go-to-market strategy. Consider how Apple’s early engineers, enamored with the iPhone’s advanced engineering, initially downplayed the need for “dumbphone” users’ onboarding. They assumed everyone could intuitively unlock a screen — a flaw that forced competitors like Samsung to lead with “easy-to-use” messaging, capturing Apple’s own blind spot. The curse of knowledge doesn’t just blind product teams to user friction; it warps how roadmaps prioritize features. Teams fixate on power-user tooling while neglecting the 5% of the app that 50% of users actually touch.

The twist? The deeper your expertise, the worse this blind spot becomes. A 2018 paper in Management Science found that software teams with more technical mastery disproportionately under-invested in user education, assuming “intuitive design would suffice.” But intuitive to experts is opaque to novices. Positioning a product as “simple” or “self-explanatory” without bridging that knowledge gap invites churn. The fix isn’t to avoid deep expertise but to weaponize it by confronting your own blind spots.

Key insights
Involve outsiders in early positioning to expose your team’s hidden assumptions.
Test user communication with people who have zero context — not just customers, but friends or family.
Tie roadmap votes to user-impact metrics, not internal team enthusiasm.
Why it matters

Assuming users understand your product as you do creates a blind spot in onboarding, support, and messaging — all critical for growth.

It skews roadmap priorities toward features that excite experts, not what unlocks broader adoption.

Use this tomorrow
1
Run a “knowledge audit” with 5 team members who haven’t used your product in 3 months; ask them to explain its core value proposition to a novice using only screenshots. Count how many references to jargon or internal terms they make.
2
Audit your website’s homepage. Highlight every technical term or acronym not explained in plain English. Replace 50% of those with analogies a 14-year-old would recognize.
Go deeper

The curse of knowledge isn’t just a product trap. It explains why lawyers oversimplify contracts, why teachers assign “obvious” homework, and why founders raise money from VCs in their own field (who can’t imagine the product’s flaws). The Newton experiment’s 17x overestimation error is a baseline; in business, the gap often widens as teams grow closer to the problem.

This bias intensifies in fast-moving tech fields. AI teams, for example, often assume users grasp model training times or interpretability, leading to tools marketed as “instant” when they’re not. The fix isn’t dumbing down but mapping explicitly between expert knowledge and user needs.