There was a wonderful commercial I remember from years ago where a matronly woman named Clara Peller judged hamburgers by the amount of beef she found in them. Quite often, when she was disappointed in her quest, she would shout “Where’s the Beef?” in frustration. Wendy’s was the chain who came up with the advertising idea and to this day the line has become a catch-phrase for value delivery and customer expectations.

I guess Clara was onto something though. In my experience, business’ often miss the beef when they’re trying to deliver value to their customers—particularly in the software product arena. I don’t know why that is exactly. Sometimes I think the developers are too abstracted from their customers. They can rarely touch or observe them. Or understand their true challenges. So they’re guessing when it comes to needs—sort of throwing the software “over the wall” for feedback.