01The wrong starting point
Most software projects begin with a stack decision. Someone picks React, someone picks a database, and then the team hunts for a problem that fits the tools. The result is software that's technically impressive and operationally useless — a system nobody wants, built to satisfy nobody.
02The right starting point
Every successful product we've shipped began the same way: sitting with the people who do the work. Watching the workflow. Finding the bottleneck. Asking why a process exists at all. Only after we can describe the business problem without a single technical term do we talk about technology.
03What understanding buys you
Understanding shortens everything after it. When you know the workflow, the data model designs itself. When you know the users, the UX designs itself. When you know the bottleneck, the feature list writes itself. The expensive mistakes in software don't come from bad code — they come from good code that solves the wrong problem.
04The discipline of asking
This sounds obvious, but it's rare in practice because it's slow and unglamorous. Asking 'why' ten times is harder than writing a spec. Yet it's the difference between a system that gets adopted and one that gets abandoned. We're willing to be slow in the first week to be fast in every week after.