Early start this morning. On my way to Washington, DC to meet with one of our synthetic research pilot clients for feedback and training.
This is the part of product development that doesn’t make it into LinkedIn posts or case studies: showing up, sitting down, and listening to what’s working and what isn’t.
Pilots fail for predictable reasons:
- The tool solves a problem nobody has
- The learning curve is steeper than the value delivered
- It works in theory but breaks in production environments
- It requires changes to workflow that people won’t make
The only way to catch these problems is to watch people use the thing you built.
Not in a demo. Not in a webinar. In their actual environment, with their actual data, under their actual constraints.
We’ve learned more from these field sessions than from any amount of internal testing. You discover what you built wrong by watching someone try to use what you built right.
Sometimes the feedback is brutal. Sometimes it’s validating. Always, it’s useful.
This is how products get better. Not through guessing what users need, but through watching what they do.
The trip back will be spent rebuilding whatever we learned is broken.
That’s the job.