The real reason visionaries panic before launch

Image created with Midjourney.

There comes a time in every visionary’s life when the ever-present gentle push in the back of the mind to make it bigger and better becomes instead an oily whisper of “You haven’t done enough.”

In some ways, this will always be true. If by “enough”, you mean, have we fully and permanently slain whatever dragon we chase such that it shall never be heard from again? With a sigh we must admit, probably not.

Most of the problems our clients seek to address are not the fully solvable kind: keeping an aging population well cared for, providing emergency telemedicine services to rural areas, improving the wellness of an entire state, providing access to financial services for credit unions, even providing better, more accurate legal documents for attorneys. These are not the kinds of things that you check off the list and never worry about again. They are problems you wrestle with, knock off some of the rough edges, cut them down to size, and re-evaluate and come at it again, maybe from a slightly different angle.

In some cases there is such a dramatic improvement that it changes the way you think about the problem into something else entirely. But the problem will still exist. We will always want people to be healthier, smarter with their money, less lonely, more protected and more secure.

But I don’t think it’s the perpetual nature of big societal problems that ails visionaries (around here we refer to visionaries as Green Shirts). Of the hundreds I’ve known in my career, virtually all have been energized by their chosen problems. It’s a chance to make a difference.

No, what gets under the Green Shirts’ skin is not Is the problem gone forever? but Did I make enough of a difference?

Me. Have I done enough? Am I enough? Who am I to think I can do all of this?

And there’s the thorn in the paw of the lion. Green Shirts are often high risk tolerance individuals who do not fear failure. But many do face a time in their lives when they fear insignificance. 

Maybe to some extent, that little spark of hope that fuels this fear is always there. The drive to do more, push farther, and take chances that moves technology and virtually every other industry forward has to come from somewhere other than securing profits and maximizing shareholder value, because there are lower-stress and more certain ways to do that. It has to come from a desire to move the needle in a big way, and that wouldn’t exist without some level of hope that this is possible.

Of course the hope that it is possible also leads to the acknowledgment that success is not certain. And that can lead to a rush of self-doubt. Am I enough? Is it enough? 

This tends to crop up with conviction when launch suddenly comes into view. The world is about to see your baby, and suddenly, after months of being excited and proud and eager, you think “What if they think my baby is ugly?” You realize that you have no proof that the world will love this thing that you love. You led all of these people down this path and what if it’s not enough? What if you are not enough?

This often manifests in our Green Shirts suddenly having the compulsion to try to stuff a couple more features they like in other products into the launch right before it happens. We need an asteroid watch feature. It’s got to have an asteroid watch feature! And an asteroid watch feature may be a lovely idea down the road, but if this is coming up in the window immediately before launch in a stronger way than it ever has before, it’s probably time for someone to gently sit down with that Green Shirt and check in to see if perhaps a bit of self-doubt has begun to creep in and if they might be distracting themselves from the anxiety of the moment with another flashy feature to chase. 

Because that’s just it: nothing’s certain. You may believe in it, you may put all of the things that matter to you into it. And still you do not know for certain how it will be received, and by extension, how you will be judged as a leader and visionary.

Here’s my advice: don’t stuff in more features yet. Pause. Lean into that anxiety. What is the voice saying? Whose voice is it? Yours? A mentor’s? A competitor’s?

Is that voice spewing absolutely baseless insecurities? Sometimes it is. Acknowledge it and let it go. You’re tackling something big. It won’t happen overnight. You’re about to face the response to those efforts, and it’s natural to feel apprehensive. Take heart: you have probably accomplished more than you let yourself believe. You don’t have to scale the entire mountain on your first pass. You just have to gain a foothold. If you’ve done that, it is enough.

But sometimes, there’s a kernel of truth to what the voice is saying. Sometimes we push so hard for speed that compromises are made which cut too deeply. If you sense there’s something behind it, you may be right, and from 20 years of launches I can tell you that the answer is almost certainly NOT that you should try to cram in more last-minute features. Rather, what you are probably missing is not more features, but more connection.

Study after study tells us that emotional connection drives brand loyalty. Emotional connection drives user satisfaction. Emotional connection makes users overlook minor missteps. In short, you’re building emotional connection. Your features are just a vehicle to get there. 

In real life, this looks like platforms like Sephora doubling down on what they call ‘emotional perks’ - forum interactions, birthday wishes, special invitations. These emotional perks drive an astonishing 75% of customer engagement at Sephora. If you’ve neglected the emotional connection of your product, sensing that may be driving the panic. This is fixable.

Let the UX team take another pass and optimize those peak moments a little more. Let the copy team polish up the verbiage for some high-stakes interactions. And for the love of gifs, make sure it looks nice in a way that’s emotionally appropriate for the moment. The aesthetics are the first thing you and everyone else will see. Invest in a couple of custom illustrations or a nice little animation that enhances a key interaction for the user. 

Need proof? A 2025 Qualtrics study shows that even modest improvements in the quality of customer experience, in the form of moving from a poor to a good experience, can increase the likelihood of recommendations by 97%. There’s not a feature in the universe that can put up numbers like that. 

When the launch is over, and the dust settles, those are the things that will matter. How did the product make people feel? How did you make people feel? People come back to products that make them feel better, not another bullet point in the feature list. 

I promise you, that connection, when you’re fortunate enough to build it, is more than enough to make a difference. 

Onward & upward.