Humans default to seeking feedback that affirms what they already believe rather than feedback they don't want to hear — a bias that can mask a failing product idea during customer discovery, because polite affirmation ("sounds interesting") is cheap and comfortable to produce and to hear, while genuine commitment signals are not.
Wiz (originally founded as "Beyond Networks," a network-security company) ran 10-15 customer calls a day early on. Weeks in, VP Raaz Herzberg admitted out loud that she still didn't understand what the team was building — see Vulnerability / "Tell Me What It Does, I Don't Know". That admission, not the calls themselves, is what forced the team to stop counting "sounds interesting" as validation and pivot toward cloud security.
The team's antidote was a concrete signal taxonomy: distinguish real buyer pull from comfortable affirmation.
"You need that pull from the other end as well, don't push too hard" — the discipline is to notice when you're the one doing all the pushing.
See also Definitional-Alignment Probe for the specific technique (asking "what exactly are we building") that surfaces whether the affirmation people are giving you is real.
Herzberg frames the same underlying discipline as a listening reframe: in early customer calls, generic positive reinforcement ('this is great', 'I love it') is noise, while genuine buyer enthusiasm shows up as unprompted requests for next steps — the prospect asking what happens next rather than merely praising the demo. This is operationalized concretely in B2B Buying-Signal Checklist (Pricing, PO Timeline, Internal Introductions) (pricing, PO-timeline, and internal-introduction requests) and reinforced by Pull, Not Push (Sales Philosophy).