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Mistaking Effort for Progress
I was 30 hours into building an amazing software platform for one of my clients. I was so excited about its potential. It had all the bells and whistles and access to more data from their sales system than you could possibly imagine.
When I committed the project to production, I couldn’t have been more pleased with myself. It was, at the time, my own magnum opus.
I presented it to my client.
Where they awestruck by my creation?
No. They hated it.
I spent 30 hours in “know it all” mode. I knew the data. I knew what I wanted to see, but I never stopped to ask the client what they wanted outside of the original idea. I built something for them for me.
In their book, “Software as a Science,” Dan Martell and friends make the argument: “You can do the right things in the wrong order and still lose.”
In that circumstance, that loss for me was unfortunate, but not catastrophic. I was able to go back and remake what my client wanted. I mean, I had to do it for free, but when I was done redoing it, the client was happy.
There’s a sometimes painful truth: it is possible to spend a lot of time building the wrong thing. In my case, I didn’t take the time to really understand the client’s requirements.
