"Once we know something, we find it hard to imagine what it was like not to know it." — Chip Heath and Dan Heath, Made to Stick (2007)
"Can you watch a recording of my product roadmap presentation? I don't know what went wrong."
Mark, the head of product at a fintech company, asked me this. He’d been in the role a little over three months.
He’d spent over two weeks preparing his product roadmap presentation. “It’s the best prepared I’d even been for any room,” in his own words.
We sat down and watched the recording. It lasted forty minutes. Not only was his deck clean, but his logic too was sound.
For the first twenty, the leadership team followed along. Then, seemingly out of the blue, questions started to pour in.
The CFO interrupted: "How does this connect to our revenue targets for Q3?"
The COO followed: "What happens if the engineering team in Europe hits delays on their side?"
Both questions had been answered clearly earlier on. Mark had even flagged the dependency risk in his opening remarks.
Fortunately, the recording ended soon after. He turned to me.
"What did I miss?"
The Tapper’s Problem
There is a reason this happens.
Back in 1990, Stanford researcher Elizabeth Newton ran an experiment that has since become famous.
She split people into two groups: tappers and listeners. The tappers were asked to tap the rhythm of familiar songs - Happy Birthday, the national anthem, songs everyone knew. Before they began, the tappers guessed listeners would identify the tune about half the time.
They were spectacularly wrong.
Listeners guessed correctly just 2.5% of the time. One in forty.
The strange part was that the tappers weren't tapping badly. They could hear the song perfectly in their own heads. Every tap felt obvious because they couldn't stop themselves from hearing the melody.
The listeners heard only a series of knocks.
That's what happens in presentations.
By the time you walk into the room, you've lived with the problem for weeks, sometimes months. You've argued over trade-offs, chased dead ends, changed your mind three times, and slowly built a picture of why this is the right answer.
Your audience hasn't.
They're seeing the problem for the first time. Which means they aren't hearing the song in your head. They're hearing the taps.
Overcoming The Curse Of Knowledge
Adding another slide or explaining a little more rarely fixes the problem. More information doesn't create shared context.
Shared context has to come first.
Sometimes that means starting with an analogy that borrows from something your audience already understands. Sometimes it's a customer story. Sometimes it's a short demo that lets people experience the problem instead of describing it.
Try This Week
Before your next roadmap or project update, ask yourself one question:
What does everyone in this room not know yet?
You've spent weeks living with the problem. They haven't. They don't know the customer frustrations you've seen, the trade-offs you've debated, or the dead ends you abandoned along the way. That invisible context is what makes the melody obvious to you and inaudible to them.
Help them experience the problem. It could be a one-minute customer recording. A support ticket read aloud. A screen recording of someone struggling to complete a task. Even a single quote that captures the frustration.
After the meeting, ask someone to explain what they took away. This will help you discover whether they heard the same song you thought you were playing.
From Elsewhere
In Portugal, desenrascanço describes the art of improvising a workable solution from whatever is available — as a practiced cultural intelligence. The word has its roots in fishing: when nets got tangled on rocks, getting free required ingenuity rather than force. The Portuguese do not consider this a compromise; they consider it a form of skill. More on desenrascanço here.