The user/company misalignment described here feels like a symptom of scale more than an inherent truth about software work. In small or niche software—a team of two serving a few hundred operators, say—you simply can't afford to build something your users hate, because there's no insulating layer of sales cycles, contracts, or switching costs. The feedback loop is too direct. The article seems like genuinely useful guidance for navigating a large org, but it's describing a very specific structural condition rather than software engineering in general.