Sometimes 'No' is the better answer

If you consider yourself a good developer, don't say "Yes" to all your client's requests...

And here is why.

As a freelancer (or even an employee), your client will come to you and will ask you to add new feature X to the project. And we developers love to dive immediately into "coding mode" (myself included). So we start working on this exciting new feature right away.

One month later, this new feature is ready & we release it to the live website. However, after some time, the client comes back to us and asks us to remove this feature or greatly change it because: "It's not really working as I expected it to be"

We just wasted a lot of our time, and our client's time & money developing a feature that wasn't really useful.

But why did this happen in the first place??

The answer is actually simple, it's because we said "Yes" without really understanding or caring...

Whenever a client asks you to add a new feature, it's not because he want to spend more of his money, it's often because he has a motivation/pain/concern in mind regarding his business.

And to solve that, he came up with a solution that, from his perspective is the best solution.

But oftentimes, that's not really the case.

And that's not saying that clients are stupid or naive or something like that. What I'm saying is that: A client is an expert in his business & he knows what his business's needs, challenges, and goals are very well. But when it comes to the technical solution to a problem, the one who (should) have more knowledge/experience is often YOU, the developer/designer.

But for you to be able to find this "best" solution, you need to dig around this feature request to really understand the motivation/pain/concern behind it.

And usually, this knowledge/understanding isn't very apparent. So you need to ask the client some good questions that will reveal this info for you.

Some good questions which I personally find effective are:

• What would X allow the user to do?
• What problem does this solve?
• What makes the current solution/method bad?
• Do you think we should push back our launch to add this feature, or is it something we can add later?
• How would that fit into the bigger picture?

Most of the times, your client will be happy to answer these questions for you, & you will work together with him to come up with the best solution for the business.

Three nice quotes come to my mind here:

“If I had asked my customers what they wanted they would have said a faster horse.”

--Henry Ford

“Ideas and feature requests should be understood, but not obeyed.”

--The Mom Test book by Rob Fitzpatrick

"Good programmers don't just provide code, they provide solutions"

--Yours humbly 😁

So the next time your client asks for a feature, don't rush, slow down & try to understand well before acting.

And that's it for today folks.

Until next time, And have a great day 👋