“I wish I would have learned how much coffee you wanted in that first experiment.”
Bryan Bischof said this halfway through his talk on building AI applications. He’d just failed to brew coffee four times in a row—on stage, in front of hundreds of people.
Each failure revealed a different mistake. Wrong filter. Forgot to grind the beans. Never asked about temperature preference. Poured before measuring the ratio.
But here’s what struck me: he never got to evaluate the downstream problems because he failed so early in the upstream steps.
This is exactly what happens when building products for construction.
A team builds a sophisticated tool—six months of development. Launch day: zero adoption.
They forgot what good consultants do: sit with the teams, asking What’s your actual problem? What workflow are you trying to improve? What does success look like at each milestone? See the friction points.
I know why this happens. Utilisation pressure. Every hour must be billable. Taking time to ask questions feels expensive.
But building the wrong thing costs far more.
In AI, they call this “evals”—structured evaluation at every dependency point. This translates directly to our industry: decompose your process into checkpoints, and evaluate at each stage.
Don’t wait until the end to discover your assumptions were wrong. Ask the critical questions at step one. We should plan slow, act fast. Invest the time upfront to ask the hard questions before you start building. Then execute rapidly
Because just like brewing coffee, if you don’t know how much your user wants in the first experiment, you’ll waste a lot of time brewing the wrong thing.