I Built a Product Around a Customer's Workaround

#ai #webdev #programming

A customer showed me a process that involved copying information into a document, highlighting certain lines, and sending screenshots to a colleague. It looked absurdly inefficient. My first instinct was to build a better version of the entire workflow. Then I asked why they used the screenshots. It turned out that the screenshots were the only way their colleague could quickly understand which parts needed attention. The workaround wasn't random. It was solving a communication problem that their existing software had ignored. I used Greta to build a prototype around that insight. Instead of reproducing the document, I created a simple interface that highlighted the relevant information and made it easy to share. The customer immediately understood the purpose because the new experience preserved the useful part of the old workaround while removing the tedious parts. That changed how I think about customer behavior. People often invent messy processes because the available tools don't fit their needs. If you simply tell them to stop doing the messy thing, you miss the reason they started. Sometimes the best product ideas are hidden inside the workaround itself.