“Do you want one” is a nice, concise test. I like it.

This thread centers on a pet peeve - that people invest tons of time, money and hope in projects which fail because what they (the inventor) believe is the golden future is not recognised as such by the market.
The surest way to get quality feedback is to try and sell the product. If you ask someone, ‘Do you want one?’, you’ll quickly know what’s great and what stinks.

My article on this topic, with example: - A classic inventor’s mistake

Good stuff. I like your precision around “self validate.”

I agree that projects fail when there’s not enough customer connection. Too many unchecked assumptions stretched over too long is a recipe for failure.

That’s a great way to summarize it - “CCE uses customers to test and measure the effectiveness of your product early and often.”

@ Henk

Thank you. I’m a fan of standing on the shoulder’s of giants and lifting others up.

Your contribution to the community with the variety of topics are extremely valuable and you provide such a refreshing sense of direction among complex chaos.

Keep up the good work, I am sure I speak for many when I say that you are an incredible human being.

Henk

At its essence this is saying “you have to ask customers what is valuable to them”. (you can add your own ‘duh’ here).

I’ve been a consultant for 16 years with over 30 customers. What I’ve seen and learned is that when any producer (software, hardware, books - anything consumer driven) runs off and builds without involving customers throughout the production life cycle their efforts typically fail miserably.

Why would guidance or guidance frameworks be any different?

The whole WORLD is focused on being able to deliver more value at a lower cost.

I’m pretty sure that there’s a consensus that fixing problems earlier is easier and far cheaper than later.

Involving the customer is how you do it.

Doesn’t TQM, XP, agile and the plethora of project management knowledge all incorporate some level of identifying what the customer values? hell yeah

I like how CCE formalizes the customer involvement. Everyone has a tendency to “self-valdiate” through intellection and minimize the need for human interaction (something about geek tendencies towards introversion). This manifests itself as “I know what’s important, I’ll just go ahead and create it and when people see it they’ll see that I’m smart and wonderful”. The road to ruin.

We see this most evident in perf and scale. People spend massive amounts of time focused on thinking about what might be the problem and never test/measure. This is the exact same issue.

CCE uses customers to test and measure the effectiveness of your product early and often.

Amen!