Building something right means walking through it, concretely, step by step, no skipping ahead. 8Examples is a toolkit and a discipline for figuring out what you’re actually building, before you build it.
Someone has an idea. A team jumps into building. Weeks pass. Then comes the moment: this isn’t what I meant.
It’s not a communication failure. It’s a thinking failure. The idea was never expressed concretely enough for anyone, including the person who had it, to really understand what it was.
You don’t figure out what you want and then describe it. The act of describing it, in concrete examples, in real scenarios, in timelines of what actually happens; that’s how you figure out what you want.
This is why you can’t be lazy about it. You can’t hand someone a vague spec and expect them to read your mind. You can’t skip the walkthrough. You have to sit with it and express it, example by example, until it’s real.
There’s no rigid process here. Every project has different constraints. What stays constant is the habit: get the people involved to express things in terms of behaviors and timelines. What does this thing actually do? What happens, and when?
The tools exist to force that clarity. You pick the right ones for the situation. Trial and error. But you always come back to the same question: can you walk through this concretely, or are you still hand-waving?
Occasional writing on building things deliberately. No spam. No schedule. Just when there’s something worth saying.