The Product Test That Was Never About the Person

In the 1990s at Creative Labs, I ran Sound Blaster. And every time someone new joined the company, I ran a test.

I'd sit them down with one of my products, still sealed in its retail packaging, next to a computer. Then I'd walk away. No prompting, no hints. Just: unbox it, follow the directions, get it installed.

Everyone who went through it believed they were being tested.

They thought I was checking how technically savvy they were. Whether they could follow directions. How well they understood the technology. Years later, one of them brought it up on a call, and it was clear he still carried that interpretation with him.

That was never it at all.

The test was of us, not them.

That person had just walked in the door. No preconceived notions about what should work. No bias about how the install was supposed to go. No incentive to be polite about the packaging, the manual, or the process. For one brief window, they were functionally a customer: brand new, no context, nothing to lose.

That window is a gift, and it closes fast. Within a few weeks, they know how the product works, how it got that way, and which broken things are "just how it is." You can't un-know that. And you can't call a customer every day to get the unvarnished version.

So I used new hires to pressure-test the product at that exact moment in time. Was it easy to install? Did the instructions make sense? Did the packaging make sense? Where did they get hung up, and where did they breeze through? Every one of them handed me honest feedback I could not get any other way.

Here's what convinced me the technique still matters: that phone call happened decades later, and he remembered it. Not the projects, not the launches. The test. A routine that everyone misread at the time stuck with someone for their whole career. Things that stick like that are usually things nobody else does.

And most companies do the inverse. They hand new people onboarding docs, tribal knowledge, and a senior engineer to sit with. Every mechanism is designed to compress that moment of freshness into conformity as fast as possible. Then a year later they wonder why nobody inside the building can see the product the way a customer does.

The pattern isn't limited to hires. It's anyone new touching your work cold: a new hire, a new client, a new contractor. The test is free, and the honest version of your product only exists in their first hour.

I let this habit lapse for years. Rediscovering it through that call made me realize how jaded I've gotten about things I'd decided can't change. The technique never stopped being valid. I just stopped using it. So I'm rebuilding it into how I work with clients now.

When someone new joins your team, what do you put in front of them first? And are you watching what that moment tells you about them, or about your product?