Product Building: What Kojo’s Voice Notes Taught About Invisible Workarounds

The relentless focus on competitive feature comparison can blind founders to the real-world problems their users face. Instead of constantly benchmarking against rivals, prioritizing deep user observation reveals the crucial, messy workflows customers cobble together, which are often the true opportunity for product building.

This became starkly clear to us one Tuesday afternoon. I was in Accra, trying to simplify our internal project management, and had just decided to delete a sprawling spreadsheet that cataloged every rival's feature set, down to the minutiae of their API endpoints. It felt like an act of rebellion against the constant pressure to copy, to respond, to match. The sheet represented months of competitive analysis, a dense, feature-by-feature breakdown of our market landscape. Deleting it was a conscious effort to clear space, to stop building against a phantom competitor and start building for real people.

The Invisible Workarounds

That same Tuesday, across town, a founder named Kojo was doing precisely what that spreadsheet failed to capture. Kojo runs a small import-export business, primarily dealing in agricultural machinery between Ghana and the EU. His problem wasn't a lack of competitor features; it was a fractured workflow held together by sheer force of will, voice notes, and a memory for details that would terrify a data scientist.

Kojo was on the phone with a client in Kumasi, trying to confirm a delivery date for a new harvester. His inventory software, a locally built solution he'd adopted years ago, had just glitched. The expected arrival date, which should have been linked to the shipping manifest, had vanished. The client was pressing, because the planting season was days away and any delay meant losing prime harvest time, jeopardizing their entire investment. Kojo knew, from years of experience, that losing this client could snowball into losing the wider network of farmers they influenced. He was looking at a genuine risk of damaging his company's reputation and bottom line.

How Voice Notes Fill the Gaps

Instead of a seamless product experience, Kojo's solution was a cascade of workarounds. While the client held, he quickly opened WhatsApp. He scrolled through weeks of voice notes from his logistics coordinator, a rapid-fire succession of updates, port clearances, and delivery estimates. He remembered a specific message from last Thursday mentioning a revised ship schedule due to bad weather off the coast of Morocco. He found it. He cross-referenced it mentally with a mental image of a customs form he'd reviewed that morning, recalling a specific stamp date. He tapped out a quick text to his warehouse manager, confirming if the initial receiving dock was clear for the updated time.

This was Kojo's "system." A patchwork of personal effort, inter-departmental favors, and an impressive capacity for holding disparate pieces of information in his head. No product on the market he'd seen, including the ones I'd diligently cataloged in my now-deleted spreadsheet, truly addressed this intricate, human-driven improvisation. They focused on feature parity, on what they could do, not on the broken, high-stakes moments where human ingenuity stepped in.

Finding the Product in the Gaps

Kojo's situation isn't unique. Every day, founders are presented with product roadmaps and competitive analyses that focus on incremental improvements or feature-matching. The real product opportunity, however, often lies in these moments of high friction, where users are forced to invent solutions because existing tools fail. They’re using spreadsheets, voice notes, email threads, and phone calls to bridge gaps that, from a distance, look like minor inconveniences. Up close, for someone like Kojo, they are critical junctures that determine whether a client stays or goes, whether payroll is met, or whether a business survives.

Deleting that competitor matrix wasn't about ignoring the market. It was about creating space to look beyond it, to observe the "invisible work" that customers do every day. It’s in these fragile, human-powered workarounds that the most impactful product ideas reside, not in another checkbox on a feature comparison table. This shift in perspective is what allows you to build a product that genuinely transforms someone's Tuesday, rather than just adding another item to their already crowded digital toolkit. AI Workflow Automation: What Thandi’s Paper Notebook Revealed About Hidden Work or Sizwe’s investor pressure. Six weeks of payroll and a customer at risk. are examples of the same pattern.

The Real Competitor is Often Chaos

When we get caught in the trap of competing feature-for-feature, we lose sight of the true competitor: the internal chaos, the manual effort, and the anxiety that customers navigate daily. Your competitor is not just another company; it is the mental load, the potential for error, and the sheer time involved in doing things the hard way. Building a product that genuinely alleviates this invisible burden, that removes the need for Kojo to scroll through voice notes or trust his memory with critical dates, creates undeniable value. That's a product that solves a real problem, one a competitor matrix would never show you.