Customers call it quick links. Behind them sits the long, slow job of understanding customer missions. Why simple outcomes need hard work underneath.
"So how would you explain this to your boss?"
She thought about it for a second. Then she smiled and said, "It's those quick links."
And then came the flicker. A little wince, almost an apology, as if she'd just described a tasting menu as "some food". She'd caught herself, worried she'd undersold it. And honestly, I'd felt it too. Years of saying "visual navigation" and "intent-led discovery" boiled down to a little thing on a sign.
My first reaction wasn't gratitude, I'll admit. It was a slight bristle. Quick links? Do you know what goes into those?
But the longer I sat with it, the more I realised she hadn't undersold anything. She'd done exactly what good upward communication does. She led with the outcome, not the mechanism. Her boss doesn't need to know how the engine works. Her boss needs to know customers get where they're going faster.
Quick is the payoff. It was never meant to describe the work.
There's a line usually pinned on Mark Twain, though it was actually Pascal: if I'd had more time, I'd have written a shorter letter. Short takes longer. Simple is expensive.
So, I've changed my position. If I want to sell you something called visual navigation, but you want to buy something called quick links – fine. I'll sell you quick links. Same product. Same price. Stop apologising for the label.
FoundIt’s Customer Advisory Board dinner the other week showed me why that matters.
Late in the evening, I asked one of the senior retail leaders what had actually got her excited about working with us. She told me she doesn't go looking for suppliers. She pays clever people to find good ideas – her job is to evaluate them. What moved the needle was one of her team walking in and saying, "You need to see this." It came up from performance marketing. And the message was simple enough that she took it straight to her board, and they got it instantly.
The idea didn't get pushed down. It bubbled up. It survived the journey only because it was simple enough to repeat. Jargon doesn't travel up a hierarchy. Quick links do.
But, and it's a big but, a simple outcome isn't the same as a simple job.
At the same dinner, she mentioned an AI visibility tool her team had been shown. It told them what the world wanted in bathroom taps. Trends, content ideas, a whole Reddit strategy. Did they do any of it? No. But it could tell them what to do.
And I couldn't help myself. Okay, that's bathroom taps today. What about next week? Is it even bathroom taps, or is it really shower taps? Insight is a snapshot. Customers are a moving picture. Knowledge is power, but it's the power to execute that closes the loop.
So let me lift the lid on what "quick" actually takes.
It starts one layer down, with the question everyone in this industry claims to ask, and almost nobody structures their site around. What is this customer actually trying to do? Not what they typed. Not which page they landed on. What mission are they on?
Answer that properly, and it changes what you build. Stop handing people an index, "here are all our taps, good luck", and start handing them the answer.
Then the machinery kicks in. You read signals from how people search on and off your site. You weigh them against what you stock, what's in range, and what's in season. You're deciding what "correct" even means for this page, for this customer, today. Then you do it all again tomorrow because the range changed, stock moved, and customers started wanting something slightly different.
The correct links at the top of a category page look effortless. They're the visible tip of thousands of small decisions nobody ever sees. Done by hand, that's a team rebuilding pages that go stale the moment they're finished. Done well, it's the right links at the right time to find the right product. Automatically.
That complexity is the actual product. It deserves the reverence we usually give a black box, not the shrug we give a UI element.
And this is where undersold quietly becomes undervalued. When the machinery stays invisible, everyone defaults to describing what they can see. A "widget". A "nav tweak". Something a merchandiser could knock up on a Friday afternoon. And once it's filed under widget, it gets budgeted like one, compared like one and cut like one.
So, keep the simple word. Just learn the sentence that goes with it. Not "we added quick links", but "we automatically show every customer the fastest route to what they're actually looking for – and keep it right as everything changes".
And it's about to matter a lot more.
Another guest told a lovely story that night. He and his wife planned an entire room with ChatGPT, furniture, furnishings, the lot, from one department store they love. Then they clicked through to the retailer's site, and the site had no idea any of that conversation had happened.
That shopper isn't arriving as a keyword. They're showing up with a whole mosaic of context, and we greet them as if they've just typed "sofa" into a search box. They aren't marginal visitors, either. Adobe's August AI Traffic Trends Report shows AI-referred traffic to US retail sites grew 62% year on year in July, with a 60% higher conversion rate than non-AI traffic and 53% more revenue per visit.
The idea I came away with is what I've started calling agentic handover: context passed from the assistant to your site, so the shopper can pick up where they left off. But they still want the final say. Bring my shopping list, by all means. Don't buy it for me.
Which, when you think about it, is just quick links again. The right links at the right time – only now "the right time" includes everything the customer did before they reached you. And none of it lands without product data that can be found.
So, what would I tell that customer's boss, if I had five more minutes?
That she was right. It is quick. That's the whole point. And it's quick because someone, or something, did the long, slow job so the customer didn't have to.
Three things I'd think about this week:
- Count the hidden job. Ask your team how many people-hours sit behind your navigation, collections and merchandising rules today. That's the real cost of keeping "quick" quick – and your real business case.
- Arm the middle, not just the board. Your best ideas probably won't arrive from the top. Give your merchandising, SEO, and paid search people small proofs of value they can show upwards, one category, a before–and–after, rather than waiting on a full integration and a lengthy A/B test.
- Get ready for the handover. Look at where AI-referred shoppers land on your site today. Does that page know what mission they're on, or just what brought them there?
Until Tuesday after next,
Warren