I Built the Wrong Feature and the Customer Thanked Me for It

#product #softwaredevelopment #softwareengineering

I misunderstood the request. Completely. The customer had asked for one workflow, and I built something slightly different in Greta because I interpreted their explanation badly. I expected them to reject it immediately. Instead, they clicked through it and said, “Actually, this is easier.” That sentence stopped me. We started talking about why. The thing I'd gotten wrong had accidentally removed two decisions from their workflow. We kept the accidental version and changed the rest of the product around it. I still wouldn't recommend misunderstanding customers as a product strategy. But there's something useful about showing people something they didn't explicitly ask for. Sometimes they discover that what they asked for was just the solution they had imagined, not necessarily the best solution to their problem.