The most public version of this right now is AI products that fail in flight. When something goes wrong, the first thing you hear is what the user did wrong - they shouldn’t have been there, they don’t know the risks, they’re not experts. The design’s failure becomes a question about the user’s competence, and the company gets held harmless. It’s a familiar shape - health insurance has run on it for years, patients reconciling EOBs against provider bills and getting blamed for the miss.

The quieter version shows up in companies losing product-market fit. That’s a fast-growing list right now - the GenAI regime that produces those public AI failures is also restructuring demand for everyone else’s: what customers expect, what they’ll pay for, what they think the work is.

A year ago, “the customer doesn’t know what they want” meant we did. We were ahead of them; they’d catch up. Now, losing fit, the same sentence comes out in the same meeting and means something different - they used to want this, and they don’t anymore, and we don’t know what to do with that. The behavior didn’t change. Who’s expected to bridge the gap did.

Same behavior, a year later, opposite meaning. A company with product-market fit doesn’t ask its customers to bridge a gap. A company losing fit does, even if it never names it. You’ve stopped finding fit and started defending it - and by the time it shows up in churn, it’s been audible in the language for a quarter or two.

Stimulus: a line in a recent Gary Marcus piece - “a lot of people want to blame the user” - got me thinking about how this shape shows up much more quietly inside companies.