When You Chase the People Who Were Never Coming
- drkimberlydunwoody
- Jul 3
- 5 min read
On June 22, 2026, Keir Starmer stood outside Downing Street and resigned as the shortest-serving Labour prime minister in history. Less than two years earlier, he had won a landslide. The story of what happened in between is, at its heart, a story about drift.
And it is a story every product manager should study, because it is the same mistake teams make in software every single day.
The Setup
Starmer won big in 2024 by being an alternative to fourteen years of Conservative chaos. That was his value proposition. That was his base. People who wanted stability, competence, and a recognizably Labour set of values put him in office.
Then he started drifting.
Facing rising pressure from the populist right, he softened his edges. He changed direction on major policies. He shifted rightward on immigration. He tried, in the words of one outlet, to become a "racist-lite version of Farage" — chasing the language and posture of voters who were already committed to Reform.
Here is the fatal miscalculation: those voters were never going to vote for him. Not one of them. Someone shopping for the genuine article does not settle for a nervous imitation. Farage voters had Farage. They did not need a cautious tribute act wearing a Labour rosette.
So Starmer moved toward people who would never choose him, and in doing so, he quietly abandoned the people who already had. His approval collapsed. His own party turned on him. He left office as the least popular prime minister on record.
He chased non-customers and lost his core users. Both walked away.
This Is Product Drift
Swap the vocabulary and you have a product post-mortem you have read a hundred times.
A product finds its people. It solves a real problem for a specific group, and those users love it precisely because of what it is. Then growth pressure arrives. A competitor looks shinier. A louder market segment appears just out of reach. And the team starts reasoning like a losing campaign.
"If we soften this opinionated feature, we might win the enterprise buyers."
"If we water down the thing our power users love, we could appeal to the mass market."
"If we look a little more like the category leader, maybe we take some of their audience."
So the product drifts. It sands off the sharp edges that made it worth choosing. It reorients the roadmap toward people who were always going to buy the incumbent anyway. And it stops being the clear alternative that earned it a base in the first place.
The result is the same as Downing Street. The people you chased do not switch — they already have what they wanted. The people who loved you feel abandoned, because you stopped being the thing they signed up for. You end up with a product that is nobody's first choice.
Drift does not feel like a decision. It feels like a series of reasonable adjustments. That is exactly what makes it lethal.
The Lesson: Your Non-Customers Are Not a Growth Strategy
There is a seductive logic in product work that goes: the biggest opportunity is the audience we do not have yet. Sometimes that is true. Usually it is a trap.
The critical question is not "how many people are outside our base?" It is "why are they outside our base?" There is a world of difference between people who have never heard of you and people who have actively chosen your competitor's identity. The first group is an opportunity. The second group is Farage voters.
You do not win committed non-customers by becoming a hedged version of what they already prefer. If someone has already picked the loud, confident original, a timid copy gives them no reason to move. It only confirms that the original was worth picking. You win skeptics, if you win them at all, by being more distinctly yourself, not less. Nobody defects toward a weaker version of the thing they already like.
Meanwhile, your core users are not a captive audience. They are not stuck with you. They stay because you keep your promise — because the product still does the specific thing they came for, in the specific way that made them choose it. The moment you dilute that promise to court people who were never coming, you break faith with the only people who ever actually showed up. And your base has options too.
This is the quiet arithmetic that sinks products and premierships alike. You spend your credibility chasing a segment that will never convert, and you fund that chase by drawing down the goodwill of the segment that already did. You are not adding a new audience on top of your old one. You are trading a loyal audience for an imaginary one. That is not growth. It is a transfer of value away from the people who trusted you, toward people who never will.
How to Catch Drift Before It Catches You
Drift rarely announces itself. So you have to interrogate it on purpose. A few honest questions, asked out loud in the room:
Who are we actually building this for? Name them. If the answer has quietly shifted from your real users to a hypothetical audience nobody has validated, that is drift.
Are these prospects genuinely available, or already committed elsewhere? Chasing the loyalists of a competitor's identity is a campaign you cannot win. Spend that energy on people who are still deciding.
What are we softening, and why? If you are dulling the exact things your users love in order to look more like someone else, stop. Those edges are not liabilities. They are the reason anyone chose you.
Would our best users still recognize this product in a year? If they would feel abandoned by the roadmap, you are repeating June 22.
Are we adding a segment, or replacing one? Real expansion serves new users without betraying current ones. If growth only works by breaking the promise that built your base, it is not growth. It is drift wearing a business case.
Drift is rarely one dramatic betrayal. It is a hundred small, reasonable-sounding compromises that add up to a product — or a premiership — nobody asked for.
Starmer's mistake was not that he tried to grow his coalition. It was that he tried to grow it by shrinking himself. He reached for the people who would never choose him and let go of the people who already had.
Do not resign your product to the same fate. When you chase the people who were never coming, the only ones you are guaranteed to lose are the ones who already showed up.
