“Wait. What?” The Spark Behind Real Innovation

We like to think of innovation as a process: structured, sequenced, neatly mapped. But more often, it begins with a glitch in the matrix. A moment when someone—usually not on the roadmap team—stumbles into something that doesn’t quite add up. A feature that behaves unexpectedly. A user doing something “wrong” on purpose. A workaround that, somehow, works better than the intended flow.

And then comes that line:“Wait. What?”

That phrase is the sound of a pattern breaking. It signals surprise, curiosity, sometimes irritation—and almost always, a fresh trail worth following.

We’ve come to see that the people most likely to trigger these moments are what we call Catalytic Customers:

• They’re unusually engaged.

  
  

• They’ve hacked or stretched your product to serve their real needs.

  
  

• And crucially, they’re not afraid to push back—or pull away—when the product gets in their way.

  
  

These aren’t early adopters or fanboys. They’re the customers who love the category more than they love your brand. And that’s what makes them valuable. They’ll show you the edge cases that matter. They’ll reveal what’s broken and what’s possible.

We’ve sat in hundreds of product team discussions where the roadmap was humming along, fueled by average user stats and best practices. But all it took was one Catalytic Customer story—a surprising use case, a novel behavior, a pointed critique—to make the room pause.

“Wait. What?”

Those are the moments that change direction. Or open a hidden door.

Too often, companies avoid this kind of friction. They standardize around predictable data. They listen to the majority. They confuse satisfaction with progress.

But the best innovations don’t emerge from consensus. They start with discomfort. With a user who didn’t follow the script. With a question no one in the building had thought to ask.

If you’re not regularly hearing “Wait. What?” from your customers—or from your own team—you’re probably not close enough to the people pushing the boundaries.

Catalytic Customers don’t just reveal what’s next.

They demand it.