Lore

"The Bubble": Internal Message Fatigue vs. Customer Freshness

A recurring check Herzberg applies at Wiz: the internal team's boredom with a piece of messaging is not evidence that customers are tired of it. Employees who live with the product and its positioning every day hit repetition fatigue on a message long before any individual customer does — most customers are still early on their own exposure curve, encountering it for the first or second time when the internal team has seen it hundreds of times.

The practical implication is to resist changing external messaging just because it feels stale from the inside, and instead check for actual external fatigue (declining engagement, direct customer feedback) before retiring or refreshing it. Herzberg frames this explicitly as the discipline of stepping outside "the bubble" of one's own team.

Related to The 'Dummy Explanation' (Assume Zero Prior Knowledge) and You Are Not Your User.