The Over-Delivery Goes Wrong

Published 31 August 2026

I like riding bikes. So much so that, in my spare time, I’m a Bikeability instructor. I’ve never been particularly technical about them though.

When my daughters were younger, we used to go on lots of family bike rides. Nothing especially ambitious: we’d pick somewhere to go, get on our bikes and set off.

The bicycle is a pretty extraordinary piece of technology. It gets you around very efficiently under your own power and it doesn’t need much maintenance.

More importantly, nobody ever needed to convince us that we needed one.

Perhaps that’s what I find interesting about Segway.

When it was launched, it was presented as a technology that could fundamentally change the way people moved around cities. It was clever, ambitious and technically brilliant. 

And people didn’t really buy it. 

There’s a particular kind of work that can be very satisfying. You take something that matters, you spot all the things that could be improved, and you make it better. More thorough, more efficient, more effective. Everyone is happy.

Except, sometimes, the person who needed the thing in the first place.

Because there is another possibility: that you have just spent an enormous amount of time making something better than anyone needed it to be. 

The Segway didn’t fail because it was badly engineered. It failed because it was brilliantly engineered for a problem nobody was desperate to solve. 

That’s the odd thing about over-delivery. It is not obvious. It can look exactly like excellence. 

In fact, we normally think of over-delivery as an unequivocally good thing. 

If someone asks for ten and you give them twelve, you’ve over delivered. If they expect something on Friday and you deliver it by Wednesday, you’ve over delivered.

But there is another kind of over-delivery; when you deliver far more than is useful or valued. Like more features than anyone needs or more sophisticated than the customer really values.

It’s not that anyone sets out saying, “Lets spend time solving a problem that doesn’t matter”.

It starts off small, and genuine. Like, “Let’s give customers more options”. Then, “While we’re here, we could also…”. 

And because every improvement sounds sensible, the whole thing can become increasingly impressive without becoming increasingly valuable.

You have built a Segway.

And Segway wasn’t a stupid idea. As I said, it was brilliant. A huge amount of intelligence and effort went into making it work. 

Businesses are very good at rewarding execution. We praise people for being thorough and we celebrate innovation. But relevance adds a very important distinction to all of these changes.

Segway’s lesson is that it isn’t enough to optimise something. You have to optimise the right thing. 

And all this doesn’t mean we should stop caring about quality. It’s the opposite: be more deliberate about where the extra effort goes. If someone needs something urgently and you get it to them early, that’s valuable. The difference is that the additional effort has a purpose. 

The distinction is between doing more and creating more value.

And sometimes the most valuable thing you can do is recognise that the customer didn’t need a Segway.

They just wanted to get somewhere. On a bicycle.