Makers often focus on the shiny object—the product they’re building—and forget about the rest of the journey until they’re almost ready to deliver it to the customer. But customers see it all, experience it all. They’re the ones taking the journey, step-by-step. And they can easily stumble and fall when a step is missing or misaligned.

There are bumps between Awareness and Acquisition, between Onboarding and Usage, between every phase of the journey, that you have to help customers over. In each of these moments, the customer asks “why?”

Why should I care?

Why should I buy it?

Why should I use it?

Why should I stick with it?

Why should I buy the next version?

Your product, marketing, and support have to grease the skids—continually communicate and connect with customers, give them the answers they need, so they feel like they’re on a smooth ride, a single continuous, inevitable journey.

The process of convincing someone to buy and use your product needs to respect the customer, needs to understand their needs at different points of the user experience. You can’t just shout your top ten features at people in a billboard and a website and packaging just like you can’t simply hand someone your résumé at an interview, then lunch, then on a date. Sure, you’re giving them important information, but different moments in the journey

require different approaches.

Your message needs to fit the customer’s context. You can’t say everything everywhere.

If you want to build a great company, you should expect excellence from every part of it. The output of every team can make or break the customer experience, so they should all be a priority. [See also: Chapter 3.1: Making the Intangible Tangible.]

There can’t be any functions that you dismiss as secondary—where you casually accept mediocrity because it doesn’t really matter.

Everything matters.

And it’s not just about you.

And pausing has other benefits as well. Studies my colleagues and I conducted found that pausing led speakers to be perceived more positively. It not only gave the audience time to process what was said, it encouraged them to respond with short verbal indicators of agreement (e.g., “Yeah,” “Un-hunh,” or “Okay”), which led them to like the speaker more overall.

So rather than saying “um” or “uh,” take a second to pause. People will perceive us more positively and be more likely to follow our suggestions.