Not Like That!

The best software arrives by accident. Not now and then, but as a rule: the parts people actually love are rarely the parts anyone specified, they're what surfaced when real users met the thing and reacted. This isn't an argument for Agile over Waterfall, or the other way round; the accident happens underneath whichever one you pick. Mostly, though, it doesn't happen at all.
Someone writes a sentence starting "As a user, I want." Someone else builds something adjacent to it, someone tests the build, and someone demos it at the end of the sprint, whereupon everyone agrees it's "Done." Two weeks later they do it again, and again, until the whole is stamped "Released."
In the end, the user it was actually built for looks at the finished thing for a while, sighs the sigh of a species that has seen this before, picks up a pen and some paper, and quietly gets on with their job.
This book takes thirty years of learning the hard way and looks at it from a new direction, using modern AI tooling to build the wrong thing first, deliberately and cheaply, so the right one has somewhere to show itself. It's about finding out what people actually need early and on purpose, rather than late, at ruinous cost, and by accident.
Adam Coombes has been on this journey himself and collected the full set of bruises. He's reached the far side with most of his fingers, bones, and career intact, and would like to spare you the painful bits, or at least point out where to look for them.