Am I building for people, or just for the budget and the client?
You sit down to work and a question follows you: am I making something good for people, or am I making something that pleases whoever is paying me? You would like both to be the same thing. Often they are not, and you know it. Notice what you do when the two pull apart. You tell yourself the budget forced your hand. You tell yourself the client understands the market better than you do. These things may be true. They are also the words of a man who has already chosen, and does not want to say so out loud. This is not a question you answer once and finish. Your work answers it every week, whether you pay attention or not. Your task is not to feel the right way about it. Your task is to look at what you shipped and name, plainly, who it actually served.
You will not settle this by feeling guilty about it. Look at the last thing you built. Ask what it did to the person who used it, not what it did for your invoice or the client's vanity. That is the whole test. Stop debating it in the abstract. Choose, then check your next piece of work against the choice.
What changes unlock by starting
- A plain test you can run on any project in under five minutes.
- Less time spent arguing with yourself in the abstract.
- A running record, in your own words, of what you build and for whom.
- The ability to name a trade-off honestly instead of hiding it from yourself.