Claim
On a 2x2 of founder-credibility × idea-legibility, the interesting square is "credible founder × illegible idea." Track the internal experiments and prototypes that have energy but no clear shape yet. Those are the next thing worth designing for. Treat product discovery like internal-VC: seed the illegible-energy bets before they're legible.
Mechanism
Legible ideas (clear roadmap items, asked-for features) get crowded fast. By the time something is legible, multiple teams are building it. Illegible ideas — frontier work where smart people have conviction without articulation — are where the asymmetric upside lives. Treating Slack channels and internal demos as a discovery feed surfaces those bets before they're public. Then the design (or PMM, or strategy) work shapes them into something legible.
Conditions
Holds when:
- The team has a substrate (Slack channels, demo days, internal preview) where illegible work surfaces.
- The lead has the discipline to read low-signal feeds frequently and probe what looks promising.
Fails when:
- The substrate is filtered to legible work only (curated demos, polished previews). Illegible work hides.
- The lead probes too soon — illegible energy needs space to develop before it gets shaped.
Evidence
Jenny credits Evan Armacost for the illegibility framework. Her example: the cloud-studio prototype → skills framework → Co-work form-factor was a chain of illegible-energy bets she watched evolve before any of them had names.
"The best AI news is internal Slack at one of these labs. What are the ideas with energy that I don't yet understand? Dive deeper."
— Jenny Wen on Lenny's Podcast, 2026-04-27
Signals
- Leaders consume internal Slack like a news feed, not just a comms channel.
- Illegible-energy bets get named promotion paths inside the team, not killed by orthodoxy.
- The team has a watch-list of unnamed prototypes; some convert to product, most don't, and that's expected.
Counter-evidence
"Illegible" is a tempting cover for "no signal." Without discipline, the framework becomes "we follow whatever's interesting" — pure dilettantism. Pair illegibility-tracking with an explicit promotion bar: at some point, energy must become a hypothesis the team can test. Otherwise it's permanent prototyping.
Cross-references
- The design role's time mix shifted from 60% mocking to 30% mocking, 30% pairing, 20% code — the operating mode this discovery fits inside