Want better tech projects? Start with the experience, not the stack.

In 1997, Steve Jobs had just returned to Apple and was taking questions from a room of developers when a man stood up and told him, more or less, that he didn't know what he was talking about.

Jobs took a long pause. Then, instead of firing back, he conceded that the man was right about some things, and described a lesson Apple had learned the hard way: you have to start with the customer experience and work backward to the technology. You can't start with the technology and then go looking for someone to sell it to.

Nearly thirty years later, most technology projects still get this backward.

The wrong first question

Too many government and enterprise projects open with "What technology should we use?" From cloud platforms to AI tools, we obsess over the plumbing before we ever ask who we're building for and why.

Look at a typical RFP: "We need a blockchain-based, cloud-native solution for XYZ." Often, nobody has interviewed a single end user.

The result is a solution in search of a problem, and millions in sunk cost. If I could put flashing lights around that sentence, I would.

Working backward

1. Define the core experience. What problem are we solving? Who are we serving? What would delight them?
2. Map the journey. Think in workflows, not wireframes. Follow a real person through a real task from start to finish.
3. Only then, choose the technology. Frameworks, APIs, AI, no-code, whatever fits. These serve the experience, not the other way around.

It pays

This isn't a matter of taste. McKinsey tracked 300 companies over five years and found that those strongest in design grew revenue at nearly twice the rate of their industry peers.

Meanwhile, failed IT projects more often trace back to misaligned goals and feature overload than to bad code.

Design as strategy

Jobs wasn't preaching design for the sake of looks. He was laying out a strategy that still holds.

Start with the experience. Work backward to the technology. It's not slower. It's smarter.

A shorter version of this article first appeared on LinkedIn. Join the discussion there.