If You Can't Explain It to a Ten Year Old, You Haven't Decided What It Is Yet

Greif Klausen — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 10:50:51 +0000

Your users don’t share your understanding of the product.

Most developers build great products. They obsess over every feature and every detail, and in that process the product becomes a lovechild. That's how good products get built, but sometimes that same obsession makes it harder to see what a first-time user sees.

Many teams assume users already understand what the product does. So they explain their product as if people are almost there, one buzzword away from getting it. It sounds professional, but the user drops off before onboarding.

Features get shipped. Onboarding gets rebuilt. The landing page gets another rewrite. But the core question stays unanswered: what exactly is this product, and who is it for?

The test that exposes this: can someone repeat back what your product does after a one-minute explanation? Not a colleague. Not a friendly investor. Someone with no context and no incentive to pretend they understood. A ten year old passes or fails that test honestly. Adults mostly don't.

When that question stays open, teams compensate by adding flows, edge cases, and features that answer slightly different versions of it. Complexity in the product traces back to indecision in the thinking. No amount of onboarding fixes that, it just hides the problem behind more interface.

Any product explanation, whether in onboarding, a pitch, or a first conversation, needs four things: what it does, who it's for, what changes for them, what to do next. Everything else needs to earn its place or get cut.

The products that communicate cleanly aren't simpler products. They're products where someone decided what the thing fundamentally is and then removed everything that complicated that answer.

The interface gets simple when the thinking does.

DEV Community: Greif Klausen

If You Can't Explain It to a Ten Year Old, You Haven't Decided What It Is Yet