Follow No Goose Absolutely

There is a Chinese proverb that applies to every early-stage enterprise AI company right now: pluck a feather from each passing goose, but follow no goose absolutely.

When you have four engaged customers asking for four different things, the natural instinct is to chase each request. One wants deterministic workflow agents for on-call automation. Another wants staff augmentation for non-engineering teams. A third wants composable agents that hand off work to each other. They are all reasonable requests. They are all informed by real pain. And if you follow all of them simultaneously, you will build three different products when you should have built one.

The fix is not to ignore customers. It is to create a venue where customer input gets synthesized instead of serialized. A design partner program with real ceremonies — biweekly syncs, shared prototypes, structured feedback — forces you to see the overlapping shape across divergent requests. Without that structure, each new customer conversation becomes a gravitational pull toward a different roadmap. You do not see the full graph. You just see the latest request, and you start building toward it. Then another request arrives, and you pivot again. The result is a product that serves nobody well.

The infrastructure underneath — sandboxes, self-hosted deployment, multi-cloud support — those bets are safe. You need them regardless of where the product surface lands. But the experience layer on top, the thing customers actually touch, needs validation before you pour concrete. The difference between a pickup truck and a minivan matters a lot when you are building the engine. And right now, most early-stage agent companies are building engines without knowing what vehicle they are designing.

What makes this moment dangerous is that enterprise AI customers churn fast. A company can spend six months deeply integrated with your tool and ditch it overnight for something marginally better. Developer-facing agent tools have near-zero switching costs because the core interaction — prompt to code — is identical everywhere. The stickiness comes from workflow, from UX patterns that non-technical users adopt and refuse to abandon. That is where the product surface matters most.

So build the infrastructure. It is the right call. But run the design partner program in parallel. Show customers provocative prototypes — rough, opinionated sketches of what the product could be — and watch which ones spark real conversation. The customers who are willing to collaborate on the future of your product are the most valuable asset you have. Use them. Just do not follow any single one of them off a cliff.