This chapter has 3 parallels — tap the highlighted passages to explore them.
"Good morning," said the little prince. "Good morning," said the merchant. This was a merchant who sold pills that had been invented to quench thirst. You need only swallow one pill a week, and you would feel no need of anything to drink. "Why are you selling those?" asked the little prince. "Because they save a tremendous amount of time," said the merchant. "Computations have been made by experts. With these pills, you save fifty-three minutes in every week." "And what do I do with those fifty-three minutes?" "Anything you like . . ." "As for me," said the little prince to himself, "if I had fifty-three minutes to spend as I liked, I should walk at my leisure toward a spring of fresh water."
Parallel 1 ★
Optimize for the outcome users actually need, not the metric that's easiest to measure.
Inbal S
Chief Product Officer at Twilio (formerly CPO at GitHub)
The most easiest one is time, but time is, it's funny what I'm going to say, but time is not quantifiable as a success metrics because you can write really bad code really fast.
Why this parallel
The merchant's pill is a perfect optimization — measurable, computable, expert-validated — and yet it optimizes for the wrong thing entirely. Inbal Shani arrived at the same realization from the other direction: when GitHub tried to measure the value of Copilot, 'time saved' was the obvious metric, the one everyone reached for first — and she had to articulate why it was a trap. Speed without quality isn't a gain; it's just a faster way to produce something hollow. Both the merchant and the naive AI dashboard mistake the vessel (time) for the destination (good work).
Parallel 2 ★
Dashboards are tools for understanding humans—when metrics become the goal, you've lost your user.
Maggie Crowley
VP Product at Toast
The one I like to have in this area is that people who are really excited about being data-driven, to me that is oftentimes a red flag for their product thinking... they're not using good judgment. They probably don't do a lot of direct user research. They don't really understand the humans who are using the thing, what they need, what they care about, and they're managing via a dashboard.
Why this parallel
The little prince's answer is not anti-efficiency — it is a redirection toward what the efficiency was supposed to serve in the first place: the actual, embodied, human experience of drinking water. Maggie Crowley is making the same move when she warns against dashboards that have forgotten users: the metrics exist to help you understand humans, but when the metrics become the end, the humans disappear. The spring of fresh water is what dashboards were always supposed to point toward — and both the prince and Crowley are simply insisting we not forget that.
Parallel 3
A perfectly executed solution to an unexamined problem is the most dangerous kind of failure.
Lenny Rachitsky
Writer of Lenny's Newsletter, host of Lenny's Podcast
We have a philosophy when it comes to building product that we shouldn't just build either what competitors are doing or take at face value what customers are asking for. Rather, we dig deeper to understand the problem they're trying to solve and what the optimal solution could be. Maybe someone thinks that x is a solution to problem y—but if you just build x without understanding problem y, you often shortchange yourself.
Prioritizing at startups [2022-01-04] (newsletter), quoting Julianna Lamb, CTO of Stytch
Why this parallel
The merchant's fatal error is not that his pill is poorly engineered — it is that he never asked what the time was for. 'Anything you like' is not an answer; it is the sound of a product team that shipped a solution without understanding the underlying human need. Julianna Lamb's hard-won principle — that building 'x' without understanding 'problem y' shortchanges everyone — is the same warning the little prince delivers in his quiet, devastating follow-up question. The most dangerous products are the ones that work perfectly and solve nothing that matters.