> I spent about 18 months working on a doomed project. For a lot of that time, I thought I was the only one who realized it was doomed.
I had a similar feeling about a project once. I thought "Boy is this stupid. No one in their right mind is going to pay for this. Why are we building this." Let me manager know my feelings. Stayed and built it.
Thing is a huge success. One of our best selling products. Boy do I still feel dumb. Very humbling, honestly. Shows what little I actually know about what people want.
Conversely, one time I worked for 12 months on a project I believed was dumb on a team of at least 30 to 40. I thought no one was going to pay for it and it made no sense why we were building it. I told my manager my feelings and he brushed them off.
A year later the entire project was wound down. It had never shipped past an extremely limited beta. It completely failed to generate any sort of traction or product market fit. The manager who brushed off my concerns left the team way before this and went to work on something else in the organization.
It’s great. It strongly warns against ego pitching, aka talking about your fancy solution, which only prompts people to say “That’s great” so you go away.
The whole book is basically how to get useful information by being curious about the potential customer, how to decode “That’s great” by asking for commitments/intros/money, and also a bit about how to know whether you’re talking to the right person in the first place.
I don’t think it’s anyone’s fault at all. Business people’s job is to understand what users want and developer’s job is to figure out how to best build it.
I had a similar feeling about a project once. I thought "Boy is this stupid. No one in their right mind is going to pay for this. Why are we building this." Let me manager know my feelings. Stayed and built it.
Thing is a huge success. One of our best selling products. Boy do I still feel dumb. Very humbling, honestly. Shows what little I actually know about what people want.