EtherHQ

Most businesses don't have a software problem. They have a workflow problem. We start there.

[EtherHQ @etherhqng]

We almost shipped the wrong thing once. The demo looked good — built fast, polished, rejected outright.

It was built before anyone understood the ask.

You can build a very convincing version of the wrong product.

[EtherHQ @etherhqng]

Sometimes the answer isn’t software at all. That’s a legitimate outcome.

[EtherHQ @etherhqng]

Your business might not have a software problem

[EtherHQ @etherhqng]

A better first question: where exactly is the work breaking down?

[EtherHQ @etherhqng]

Because software built on top of a broken process doesn’t fix the process. It makes the same problems faster and harder to see

[EtherHQ @etherhqng]

The build was never the hard part.

[EtherHQ @etherhqng]

Most software projects don't fail because the software was built badly.

[EtherHQ @etherhqng]

A team asks for a system. Someone builds it. It works exactly as specified — and still doesn't fit, because the spec described what people said they do, not what happens when the work moves between them.

[EtherHQ @etherhqng]

The build is the easy part.

Knowing what to build isn't.

[EtherHQ @etherhqng]

A law firm asked us for a case management app.

The problem turned out to be that a case could depend entirely on one physical file.

That gap — between what gets requested and what's actually wrong — shows up in almost every project.

[EtherHQ @etherhqng]

Plus one we ask ourselves constantly:

Did we actually learn this, or are we assuming it?

On the legal project we nearly claimed info was scattered across WhatsApp, spreadsheets and email. It sounded right. We hadn't established it.

So we removed it.