4. Making Products Consumable

“A customer is the most important visitor on our premises. He is not an interruption in our work. He is the purpose of it. We are not doing him a favour by serving him. He is doing us a favour by giving us the opportunity to do so.”

—Mahatma Gandhi^[1]

^[1] Mahatma Gandhi, reportedly stated in 1890.

The whole point of building software is to satisfy your stakeholders’ needs. Accordingly, if you respect your stakeholders, you should be eager to see them succeed at using your product. This seems obvious. A moment’s thought about how most applications really work, however, should reveal that as a rule, the software industry does not deliver on this simple promise. All too often the time between acquiring software and seeing real value is far too long, the effort far too high, and the outcomes inconsistent, all of which have a negative economic impact.