Nobody Asked for the Wheelie Suitcase

We put a man on the moon before we put wheels on a suitcase. For most of the twentieth century, travellers hauled heavy cases through stations and airports by hand, and nobody thought of this as a problem worth solving. It was simply what travelling involved. Wheeled luggage started to appear around 1970, and it took until the late 1980s for the upright case with a telescopic handle to catch on. Today it seems absurd that it took so long, and that's the point. Nobody asked for it, because nobody saw carrying a suitcase as a problem. It was just the price of going somewhere.

I call this “the accepted burden”. It's the cost, effort or loss customers have lived with for so long that they no longer notice it. They don't complain about it, because it doesn't feel like a failure of anyone's product. It feels like a fact of life. Ask them what would make things better and they'll suggest improvements to what already exists, not an end to the burden itself, because they've stopped seeing it.

The accepted burden is some of the most valuable territory in any market, for the simple reason that nobody is looking there. Competitors benchmark the features customers ask for. Research captures the complaints customers make. Roadmaps prioritise the requests customers submit. None of these will ever surface a burden that customers have folded into the definition of doing business.

Some years ago I worked with a payments business preparing to launch a new product to reduce payment failures. The technology came from a problem it had solved for itself. To protect its own revenues, it had become very good at predicting the likelihood that a recurring payment would fail, and at knowing exactly when to try again. The question was whether merchants would value that capability, and the customer research gave an unexpected answer. Most merchants had never thought of failed payments as a problem that could be solved. They assumed a certain level of bad debt and subscription churn was simply part of running a recurring business, in the same way a restaurant expects a few broken plates. In reality, most of it was avoidable.

That changed the whole proposition. The product didn't need to persuade merchants it was better than an alternative, because in their minds there was no alternative. It needed to persuade them that the burden they'd accepted didn't have to be carried at all. We built the proposition around a single line, "payment failure is optional, not inevitable", and it went on to be a significant success for the business, which was later acquired.

The lesson I took from it is that accepted burdens often hide in plain sight as numbers. A churn rate, a write-off, a rework percentage or an error rate that everyone treats as a constant is often a burden that nobody has thought to question. Once something becomes a line in the accounts, it stops looking like a problem and starts looking like the cost of doing business.

So look for the numbers your customers treat as fixed, and listen for resignation rather than complaint. Phrases like "that's just how it is", "everyone has to do it" and "it comes with the territory" are signposts. So are rituals: the monthly write-off, the weekly reconciliation, the evening admin. Look for the effort and loss that sit between the valuable parts of someone's work, and for the things people only mention when you ask them to walk you through the last time something went wrong.