The PSE-customer overlap: two circles that expose guessing

Draw two circles on a whiteboard. In the first, list everything your company offers: every product, service, and experience you ship, including support, onboarding, and billing. In the second, list the tasks your customers are actually trying to get done and the needs they are trying to meet. The PSE-customer overlap test asks one blunt question: how much do these circles share? Where they overlap, you are solving real problems. Where your circle stands alone, you have built things nobody asked for. Where the customer circle stands alone, you have experience debt: known needs your offering fails to meet.

Why it matters to the business

This exercise exists because companies flatter themselves. Bain's Closing the Delivery Gap study surveyed 362 firms and found 80% believed they delivered a superior experience; only 8% of their customers agreed. That gap between belief and customer reality is what separate circles look like in the wild. Every offering outside the overlap carries real cost with no return: development spend, support load, and roadmap attention that produce no customer value.

The unserved side of the customer circle is churn waiting to happen. PwC's Experience Is Everything study found 32% of customers will walk away from a brand they love after one bad experience, while great experience commands up to a 16% price premium. Overlap is where retention and pricing power live.

How to use it

• Inventory your offering circle honestly: every product, service, and experience, including the unglamorous ones like billing and returns.
• Build the customer circle from evidence: support logs, search queries, analytics, and interviews, never from a brainstorm.
• Run a Top Tasks vote, per Gerry McGovern's method: let customers vote on what matters, because a small handful of tasks usually dominates.
• Label every unmet customer task as experience debt and rank it by revenue at stake.
• Flag everything in your circle with no customer counterpart as a candidate to cut, merge, or fix.
• Redraw the circles every quarter and report whether the overlap grew.

Where teams get it wrong

The classic failure is filling the customer circle from inside the building. A roomful of managers lists what customers obviously must need, the circles overlap beautifully, and everyone leaves reassured. That is not alignment; it is Bain's 80/8 delivery gap redrawn on a whiteboard. The customer circle only counts if customers supplied its contents through research, behavioral data, and their own words.

Ask your team

• Can we name our customers' top ten tasks, and what evidence says those are the top ten?
• What share of our current roadmap traces to a verified customer need rather than an internal request?
• What did we ship last year that customers never used, and what did it cost us?

If the circles barely touch, you are running a product dictatorship.