Client (Anonymized)
The Two-Year Mistake
The Situation
Day two of the workshop. A customer arrives with their own PowerPoint. UI mockups they drew themselves. A user-journey map. Two minutes in, they point at the screen: "If you built this button and this selection flow, it would save us a week of work per month." Then they say the thing the room hadn't quite expected: "I've been trying to tell the company this for years. Nobody was listening." Two years of product development, and the answer was sitting in a customer's drawer the whole time, waiting for someone to build the forum where it could be said.
The Problem
An engineering software company had spent two years building a new version of their product. When they finally showed it to customers, the reaction was confusion. No user testing during development. Customer support and sales received user feedback constantly — and treated it as troubleshooting, never as product input. The product team built in isolation. The customers had the answers. There was no feedback loop connecting them.
The Approach
User interviews with existing customers, recorded and edited into highlight videos
Two-day workshop starting each day with user interview highlights
Post-it exercises: note, vote, cluster to map current ways of working
Sailboat retrospective to surface pain points and blind spots
Design thinking training for the product team
The Magic Moment
One user came to the interview with a PowerPoint presentation. UI mockups. A user journey map. They said: 'If you built this button and selection flow, it would save us a week of work per month.' They had been thinking about this for years. Nobody had been listening.
If you built this, it would save us a week per month.
The Outcome
The team restarted development of the new version with a user-informed approach. They changed their operative methods entirely based on the two-day experience.
Complete pivot in product direction based on real user needs
Team learned methods they continue to use independently
Feedback loops established between users and product team
Waterfall process replaced with iterative, user-centric development
What Transferred
The methods transferred permanently. The team now runs their own user research and has direct channels to customers. They don't build in isolation anymore.
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