One Million Copies of Moby-Dick

What a data center tour taught me about talking to customers

Most organizations respond to customer confusion the same way: they add documentation. Another page. Another diagram. Another tooltip. More words, on the theory that if customers are confused, they must not have enough information yet.

That's rarely the problem. The problem is usually that the information exists in the wrong language.

I learned this on, of all places, a data center tour.

The problem is translation, not volume

Early in my career, hosts would often offer to show me their data center before a meeting. I've been in dozens of them, and here's the truth nobody wants to hear: they're all the same. Rows of boring boxes. A few blinking lights. One host even started to apologize before we walked in — "you've probably seen a bunch of these, they're all the same" — and he was right, until this one wasn't.

This particular data center had been designed for visitors, not just engineers. Server racks were labeled by function instead of model number. Storage clusters were grouped by what they actually did for the business, not by their technical specs. And next to one of the storage arrays was a placard that had nothing to do with capacity, throughput, or redundancy.

It said: each of these drives can hold a million copies of Moby-Dick.

Nobody on that tour needed a lecture on storage architecture to understand what that meant. Most of us haven't read Moby-Dick, but we all know it's long. A million copies of it, on one drive, is instantly, viscerally comprehensible in a way that "40 petabytes" never will be.

Why this happens

Product teams live inside their own systems all day. Fluency becomes invisible to the people who have it. So when a customer looks confused, the instinct is to explain more — more detail, more precision, more jargon carefully defined — when what the customer actually needed was a bridge from something unfamiliar to something they already understand.

Recall that automobiles were originally called “horseless carriages.”

This is the same mistake product teams make with feature lists, release notes, onboarding flows, and pricing pages. We assume the gap is a knowledge gap. Usually it's a translation gap. And no amount of additional documentation closes a translation gap, because documentation is still written in the vendor's language.

What "translation" actually looks like

The data center placard didn't simplify the technology. The drives still held exactly as much data as they held before someone wrote that sign. What changed was the frame. Storage became literature. An abstraction became something the visitor could picture without any technical background at all.

That's the skill. Not dumbing things down — translating them. Take whatever number, mechanism, or process is true about your product, and find the unit of measurement your customer already carries around in their head.

A SaaS company I worked with used to describe uptime in "nines" — 99.9%, 99.99%, and so on — because that's how the industry talks about it internally. Customers didn't have an intuition for the difference between three nines and four. Once the team reframed it as "this is roughly nine hours of downtime a year" versus "under an hour," the conversation with prospects changed instantly. Same fact. Different language.

The real lesson

That tour stuck with me because it respected the visitor. It didn't assume ignorance and start teaching computer science from scratch. It assumed intelligence… and simply translated from machine to human language. That's a meaningfully different posture, and customers can feel the difference.

If you’re offered a facilities tour, or any tour, take it. You'll learn more from watching how someone explains their world to an outsider than you will from most customer interviews.

As Yogi Berra put it, "You can observe a lot by watching."

What to do next

Pick one piece of product communication this week — an onboarding screen, a pricing page, a release note — and read it as if you'd never worked at your company. Circle every number, acronym, or mechanism that only makes sense to someone who already knows the answer. For each one, ask: what does my customer already understand that this could map to?

You won't get a Moby-Dick-caliber translation on the first try. But the instinct to look for one, instead of reaching for more documentation, is the whole skill.

Excerpt from Customer Conversations: A Product Manager’s Superpower by Steve Johnson.