How Do We Really Know If a Proposition Is Working?.

Published: 2025

Through some of the work I have been doing recently, I have had the opportunity to sit down with customers and listen — properly. Not through a survey. Not through a dashboard. In actual conversations, hearing their stories and their experiences: what landed well, what did not, and what they had quietly worked around without ever telling anyone.

It has been a privilege. And it has been a reminder of something simple but important: success is not always visible in the data.

What the metrics miss

In proposition design and customer experience, we spend a lot of time measuring outcomes. Conversion rates. Satisfaction scores. Call volumes. Completion rates. All of it valuable. None of it complete.

These metrics tell you what happened. They rarely tell you why, and they almost never tell you what it felt like — which, for the customer, is often the thing that determines whether they stay, whether they trust you, and whether they would recommend you to someone they care about.

A brilliant piece from the Stanford Social Innovation Review on deep listening for impact measurement makes the point precisely: people are the experts of their own experience. The article describes how structured, repeated listening to customers over time revealed impacts that no metric had captured — including benefits that customers themselves only articulated once they had lived with a product long enough to understand what it had changed for them. Impact, it turns out, is often felt over time rather than at the point of purchase — which means measurement snapshots consistently miss it.

What conversations surface that dashboards cannot

In the conversations I have had, three categories of insight kept appearing — none of which would have shown up in standard outcome metrics.

Where we have unintentionally created friction. Customers describe workarounds, hesitations, and moments of confusion that never generate a complaint or a support call. They just quietly make the experience worse — and the customer absorbs the cost. From the data's perspective, the journey completed successfully. From the customer's perspective, it was harder than it needed to be.

Where customers are compensating for poor design. This is the one that should worry proposition teams most. When a product does not quite work, engaged customers often fix it themselves — with spreadsheets, with reminders, with informal processes of their own. The product looks like it is working because the customer is doing unpaid labour to make it work. That is invisible in every standard metric, and it is a churn risk waiting for a better alternative to appear.

Where needs are being met in ways we did not anticipate. Sometimes the most valuable thing a product does is not the thing it was designed to do. Customers find their own uses, their own value, their own reasons to stay. Understanding this is not a curiosity — it is strategic information about what to protect and what to build on.

Bringing listening into the measurement framework

The conclusion I keep arriving at is not that quantitative measurement is wrong. It is that a measurement framework without structured listening is incomplete in a specific and dangerous way: it systematically overweights what is easy to count and underweights what customers actually experience.

The practical shift is to treat qualitative listening as a formal part of the measurement framework, not an occasional research exercise. Regular, structured conversations with customers — including the ones who are not complaining, and especially the ones in circumstances your standard journey was not designed around. Findings fed directly into proposition development, with the same weight as the dashboard.

Qualitative research is what tells you why customers did what the data shows they did — and in my experience, the why is where all the design opportunity lives.

The more we bring this kind of listening into how we measure, the better equipped we are to design propositions that work in the real world. Not just on paper. Not just in the dashboard. In the actual lives of the people they were built for.