Typicality

You're seeing it when a product team designs exclusively for the "average user" and ignores power users and novices. The typical user is a useful abstraction for prioritisation, but the atypical users often reveal the product's greatest opportunities and vulnerabilities.

You're seeing it when a risk model calculates expected losses based on typical market conditions and fails to account for atypical events — the tail risks that produce the largest actual losses.

Know your typical customer deeply — they drive the majority of your business. But study your atypical customers just as closely. The outliers often signal where the market is heading, what's breaking in your product, or where the next opportunity lies.

Kroc built McDonald's on typicality — standardising every aspect of the restaurant experience so that the typical visit was identical everywhere. The same burger, the same fries, the same speed, the same cleanliness. This ruthless commitment to the typical case created the most scalable restaurant system in history. But Kroc also studied atypical franchisees obsessively — the ones who innovated (the Big Mac and Egg McMuffin came from atypical operators) and the ones who failed. Typicality drove the system's reliability; atypical cases drove its evolution. Founders should master both: design for the typical case to build scalable systems, but study the atypical to find the innovations and risks that the typical case hides.