As a junior PM at Facebook, I was taught—and rewarded—for thinking in models.
Models were how you earned credibility. How you framed roadmaps. How you justified tradeoffs. If you could explain user behavior cleanly and map it to metrics, you were doing the job well.
Fresh out of the RPM program, I joined a team tasked with restoring Facebook to relevance with teenagers and young adults.
At the time, the diagnosis seemed obvious. Facebook had lost certain core “jobs.” We’d lost casual sharing to Snapchat—so Facebook needed Stories. We’d lost short-form entertainment to Instagram—so Facebook needed memes and video.
Close the utility gap. Defend the empire. Problem solved.
But when we talked to real people, they didn’t tell us Facebook lacked Stories or memes.
They didn’t tell us Facebook didn’t solve problems for them.
They told us Facebook wasn’t cool.
That answer was deeply inconvenient. “Making Facebook cool” wasn’t a job to be done. It didn’t fit our framework. So we treated it as a brand problem—something external and superficial—to be solved later, probably by a quick ad-campaign, once we fixed the real utility gaps.
Lest you mistake this for a skill issue: this team was stacked. Former founders. Exceptional designers and researchers. Access to more data and resources than almost any product team on earth.
But what we didn’t have was a mental model that reflected the reality of our situation.
So we did exactly what our chosen model dictated. We built the missing features. And we watched as we continued to lose our hold on American youth.
Because what those teens actually cared about wasn’t posting photos or sending messages. They cared about belonging. About signaling that they were cool. That they knew what was in. That they mattered.
They wanted a product that told a story about who they were—and how they were connected to other people.
Consumer products are not just tools. They are narrative devices. People don’t choose them because of a spec sheet. They choose a product because it advances their personal story—because it moves them closer to who they want to be.
Don’t believe me? Consider these two sentences: “I messaged her on LinkedIn.” vs “I sent her a DM on Instagram.” The functionality on both apps is similar, but the story of what each means—totally different.
Most of us learn the value of models before we have our first job.
We’re trained in an academic world that prizes elegant theories and legible abstractions. The highest-status work is clean, internally consistent, and explainable. If you can reduce a messy reality into a framework that fits on a slide or in a tight essay, you are rewarded for it.
In College, I studied economics—a field notorious for elegant models that never quite work. Its assumptions are fragile, its predictions frequently fail, and its most influential ideas often collapse the moment they encounter real human behavior. As a favorite professor put it once in a senior seminar:
“For the last four years, we’ve taught you economics based on the assumption that human beings are rational. But of course that’s utter bullshit. What’s interesting is what happens when you let that assumption go.”
All models are wrong because all models are lossy compressions of reality. That’s why they’re useful—and why they eventually fail. But when a model works too well, when it becomes dominant, we begin to mistake it for reality itself.
And once that happens, the things the model can’t see start to disappear from view.
Game designers have a term for when players stop inhabiting the world of a game and start seeing only the mechanics. They call it seeing the spreadsheet.
The rules are clear. The incentives are obvious. The game still functions—but it is no longer alive.
When you build tools, users see the spreadsheet from day one. There’s no story to inhabit, no arc to follow—just features and functions. This is what Jobs to Be Done produces: useful software that nobody loves.
Great products hide the mechanics behind the arc. You don’t see a widget—you feel loved. You don’t see an AI model—you feel like a musician. The technology disappears into the transformation.
The best consumer products cast users as the hero of a narrative arc: someone with a desire, pursuing it, transformed by the pursuit. That’s deeper than a hammer hitting a nail. It’s someone building a house for their family. The hammer is the same. The story is everything.
Locket doesn’t give you a widget. It casts you as someone who is loved and remembered. Each photo that appears is a beat in that arc—evidence that the story is real.
Suno doesn’t give you an AI tool. It casts you as someone who creates music. Each track is proof that you’re becoming who you imagined you could be.
Vibe coding tools don’t promise perfect code or easy deployment. They promise that you can put an idea into the world—that you can be a builder. Each app you ship is evidence that you’re a maker, not just someone with ideas.
When people obsess about wedges, they are obsessing about how to build a better hammer.
The story-first founder asks a different question: who is this person trying to become, and what is the simplest way I can help them feel like they’re on their way?
AI is making it easier than ever to go from wanting to do something to doing something. And that makes this moment uniquely potent for storytellers.
The dominant framing for AI is “copilot”—tools that help you do what you already do, faster. That’s Jobs to Be Done logic applied to a new technology: identify the job, remove the friction, ship the feature. It works well for B2B, where jobs are legible and buyers are rational.
But for consumers, the most interesting thing AI does isn’t accelerating existing tasks. It’s collapsing the distance between who you are and who you’ve imagined being.
The barriers that once kept people from being musicians, filmmakers, writers, founders—years of practice, access to equipment, raw talent—are suddenly negotiable.
That’s not just a tool. It’s a narrative unlock. User as hero. App as call to adventure.
The founders who understand this will build differently.
They won’t ship “AI-powered pro tools.” They’ll create a generation of casual music producers.
They won’t ship “AI Final Cut.” They’ll sell a world where you can dabble in being a visionary filmmaker.
Because these founders understand: no one plays the game for the spreadsheet.