It was the tenth call.

I had been on the first one. A customer data project, matching records across systems to connect outcomes to the right source. It seemed straightforward enough that I handed it off and moved on. What followed was eight more calls between my team and the customer, each one ending with a tweak to the logic, each tweak fixing something and revealing something else.

The problem wasn’t the code. It wasn’t the team. It was that nobody had defined success criteria before the work started. Nobody had asked: what does done actually look like?

By the time my team pulled me back in, it was already swirling. The customer’s manager had joined too. I suspect that because the issue still wasn’t resolved, he felt the need to get involved. We had a piece of logic built by people who were no longer on the team, results that were almost always right, and a team that had been grinding on this for weeks.

I asked a simple question: What do you actually want?

That was it. Every previous conversation had been about what the code wasn’t doing right, assuming the approach was sound and just needed adjustment. Nobody had stopped to ask whether the approach itself was the right one. The answer to that simpler question was: when this happens, here is what we expect to see. And the solution that followed was far simpler than what we had been building toward. A defined set of conditions, clearly mapped to outcomes. The complexity we had been wrestling with wasn’t a feature of the problem. It was a feature of never having properly defined the problem.

We left that meeting with a clear destination. We should have had that conversation on call one.

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