People's stated preferences — what they say they want when asked directly, e.g. in a survey or focus group — often diverge from their revealed behavior — what they actually choose when given the real option.
Illustrative case (Chris Jones, SVPG): in a Walkman/CD-Walkman focus group, kids said they preferred new colors (red, yellow) over the traditional black casing. When given a free sample to actually choose from, they all took the black Walkman anyway.
This is a caution against taking direct customer/user statements of preference at face value, and is one of the underlying reasons Customer Requests as Clues, Not Specs treats requests as clues rather than literal specs — what someone says they'd choose in the abstract is not reliable evidence for what they will actually choose or use.
A leader can sincerely believe in empowerment and the Product Model (vs. Roadmap Model) and still undercut it through unexamined day-to-day behavior and language — the belief is a stated preference, the behavior is the revealed one, and the gap is usually invisible to the leader themselves. 'The company cares about what the leaders care about': whatever a leader's attention, questions, and reviews actually reward is what the org will optimize for, regardless of what the leader says they value. This is why transformation coaching has to work on leaders' concrete habits (see Context / Culture / Coaching Framework) rather than stopping at getting leaders to state agreement with the model.
Из тем: The Product Operating Model