One of our favourite books on the Dandy bookshelf is Click by Jake Knapp with John Zeratsky, the same authors behind the bestselling Sprint. At its core, Click is about reducing uncertainty before commitment. Rather than investing heavily in ideas based on assumptions, it encourages exploration, prototyping and learning early, building confidence before making significant investments.
Unlike approaches centred on continuous customer discovery throughout product development, Click focuses on reducing uncertainty before major commitment. The emphasis is not on continuous feedback, but on building confidence at the point where strategic commitments are made.
We’ve spent years working with leadership teams across different industries. Despite working in very different contexts, we keep noticing the same pattern. Conversations quickly turn to initiatives, projects, roadmaps and solutions. Far less time is spent exploring whether those ideas address the right customer problem in the first place.
“Every once in a while, a new way of doing things comes along and everything clicks. The new way solves an important problem. It’s unique. But most new products don’t click. They flop… So what is the difference? … Does it click?”
It resonated with something we’ve observed repeatedly in our work with leadership teams.
In our experience, organisations rarely struggle because they lack ideas. The challenge is often that conversations move quickly towards solutions before there is enough confidence that the underlying problem is worth solving.
For a long time, that may have been acceptable. Creating new products and services was expensive, making development capacity the natural constraint. But as the cost of creating continues to fall, investing in the wrong opportunity becomes increasingly difficult to justify.
After all, people most likely don’t choose products just because they are technically impressive. They choose them because they solve meaningful problems better than the available alternatives.
Generative AI is rapidly reducing the cost of exploring ideas, creating concepts, building prototypes and producing first versions of products and services. It raises an interesting question: if creating becomes easier, does the real challenge become choosing what is worth pursuing?
Finding that answer starts with understanding what customers truly value. Perhaps that is where leadership teams need to spend more of their attention before making major commitments.
A few years ago, my former colleague Jenny and I explored this question in the Dandy White Paper by asking ourselves What defines a great product?
We concluded that a product is more than just a solution. It’s something people actively choose because the value it creates outweighs the effort required to use it. Great products solve meaningful problems, fit naturally into people’s lives and give them a reason to return, recommend and stay loyal.
Looking back, I think that definition connects surprisingly well with one of the central ideas in Click. Successful innovation isn’t about generating more ideas. It’s about increasing confidence that you’re solving the right problem before committing to a direction.
Yet, in practice, we often observe something quite different.
Leadership teams spend a great deal of time discussing projects, initiatives, roadmaps and investment decisions. As conversations evolve, proposed solutions become more detailed, budgets are approved and delivery begins. Somewhere along the way, what started as an assumption or hypothesis quietly turns into something that feels like a fact.
But certainty might be an illusion. Every strategic initiative is still a hypothesis about how customers, markets or organisations will respond. Until it’s tested in the real world, it’s simply our best assumption.
The larger the investment, the more expensive it becomes to discover that the original hypothesis was wrong and to change course.
One of the ideas I appreciate most in Click is the Founding Hypothesis, a central outcome of the book’s Foundation Sprint. Rather than treating strategy as a set of facts, Knapp and Zeratsky encourage teams to express it as a clear, testable hypothesis: who the customer is, which problem is worth solving, the approach, the alternatives customers have today, and why they would choose this solution instead.
And that confidence rarely comes from a single breakthrough. More often, it emerges through many small learning loops.
Every customer conversation, every prototype and every experiment reduces uncertainty. Sometimes they strengthen the original hypothesis. Sometimes they change it completely. And occasionally, after enough learning loops, something finally clicks.
That’s why we have become increasingly interested in what happens before organisations commit to a strategic direction. Helping leadership teams explore what is truly worth pursuing has become just as important as helping them deliver.
The ideas in Click also influenced how we approached one recent leadership engagement. Instead of beginning with initiatives, participants first explored assumptions, strategic choices and what was truly worth pursuing together. The objective wasn’t to reach conclusions. It was to build confidence about what deserved to be explored next.
The interesting thing wasn’t that the group generated better ideas. It was the learning to stop converging too early. They became more comfortable exploring uncertainty before trying to eliminate it. This is where we believe leadership systems need to evolve.
Generative AI is rapidly reducing the cost of exploring ideas, creating concepts, building prototypes and producing first versions of products and services. That makes us believe that leadership teams will create the greatest value somewhere else.
If creating becomes easier, the scarce capability may no longer be generating possibilities. It may be recognising which of those possibilities deserve commitment.
And choosing what deserves to be built ultimately comes down to differentiation.
One of our favourite ideas from Click is that differentiation isn’t primarily about competitors. It’s about finding the intersection between something people truly value and something your organisation can uniquely deliver.
That’s where products become memorable.
That’s where they become difficult to copy.
That’s where they click.
In our experience, this is one of the capabilities leadership systems need to strengthen. Not simply generating more possibilities. But improving the quality of judgement before commitment. Perhaps this also changes how we think about strategy.
Less certainty.
More learning.
Fewer assumptions.
More evidence.
Less debating solutions.
More understanding of problems before committing to them.
Because when creating becomes easier, understanding what is truly worth pursuing may become one of the most valuable capabilities a leadership team can develop.
And perhaps that’s what finding the click has always been about.
Not creating more ideas, but developing the confidence to recognise which ones truly deserve commitment.
I doubt Jake Knapp set out to write a book for the AI era. Yet many of the principles in Click feel remarkably well suited to the questions leadership teams are beginning to ask today.
