We did all our homework and are ready to build! Wait, why is everyone screaming at us
Disproof
Youâve actually run this by everyone
Consequences
If something is built without considering the needs of those bringing it to market and those keeping it running, it has a high chance of not making it to market, or running
If the product even makes it past QA, it, will be received as well as a live grenade
Youâre left with the choice of slamming on the breaks, or risking negative net revenue, criminal liability, reputation damage or worse
Causes
This is generally symptomatic of poor organisational design and poor communication design, coupled with poor alignment effort on all parts
Information is not being automatically propagated, and if that information causes concern for some stakeholders they donât action it
Or, some genius tries blasting all information at everyone, and everyone tunes it
The lifecycle usually goes thus:
In the early days, everyone was in the same room. Everyone knew what they needed
Then you grew, and the amount of information did too. People structurally couldnât know everything, and nobody taught them how to share relevant information
The teams became bigger and more isolated until someone said âEnough! We need alignment meetings, talk to each otherâ
These eventually got bloated/useless because the people running those meetings were too busy to tune them or spread information to their teams
Everyone throws up their hands at how busy they are in useless meetings and scraps them
Eventual dumpster fire as something that should have been communicated, wasn't
Approaches
Pretty much the entire company including its investors need to be considered when building anything, even if itâs a cursory confirmation that they donât need to care
This is is NOT a license to build by committee
You could just automate every job outside the product team, but you better have an ironclad plan on how user acquisition and support is going to work, among other things
Or more simply, automate enforcing the consideration of non-product stakeholders