The first version is never right and that’s the point

The aged care COO said it best: ”@#$%ing amazing. But not fit for purpose.”

We’ve heard some version of this on every engagement. The first delivery is impressive. The technology works. The concept is proven. And then you put it in front of the people who actually have to use it, and the gap between “impressive” and “usable” becomes very real.

The gap isn’t technical. It’s domain knowledge. The unwritten rules. The edge cases that only surface when real people are running real workflows. The things nobody thinks to put in a requirements document because they’re so obvious to the people doing the work that they forget to mention them.

With Wayfinder, the first version could roster. It could check compliance. It could optimise routes. But it didn’t understand how coordinators think about carer-client relationships. The soft signals. The fatigue patterns. The personality matching that experienced humans carry in their heads.

Two weeks later, we came back with a rebuild. Not a patch — a rebuild informed by everything we’d learned watching the team react to version one. That version was “almost perfect.”

We’ve stopped treating the first delivery as something that should be right. It’s a hypothesis. A provocation. A thing we put in front of people specifically to learn what we don’t know yet. The real product starts in the gap between reaction and revision.

If the first version is perfect, we probably didn’t learn anything. The question we’re still chewing on: how do you build this expectation into the client relationship from day one — so the “not fit for purpose” reaction lands as progress, not failure?