At a token project's community call, the founder announced that utility was ready to be revealed as soon as everybody stopped asking about it. The room fell silent for several seconds. Then a moderator asked whether silence counted as delivery, and the founder reset the readiness clock.
"The utility is too important to rush into an explanation," the founder said, unveiling a slide labelled Beyond Utility. Asked what lay beyond it, he clicked to a slide labelled Beyond Explanation. The creative team received enthusiastic praise for removing a potentially distracting bullet point from the deck.
The roadmap divided development into awareness, anticipation and a final phase represented by a locked emoji. Community volunteers began speculating about the lock. One proposed that unlocking it would be the utility. Another suggested that the lock already worked perfectly because nobody could open it. Both interpretations were added to a frequently asked questions page containing no answers.
A developer tried to restore order by describing a small feature that could actually be built. This was judged insufficiently expansive and returned for a larger vision. The feature became a platform, the platform became an ecosystem and the ecosystem became a diagram whose arrows could not fit on the screen. The developer was asked to make the diagram responsive before returning to the feature.
At the next call, the founder finally opened the locked roadmap section. Inside was a survey asking the community what utility it wanted. The moderator congratulated everyone on becoming stakeholders in product discovery. The developer selected fewer arrows and was immediately thanked for participating in the ecosystem.