Dave, you’re right, that’s a really important point to keep in mind, and your example illustrates it really well. There is always the risk that we get the first high level needs collected from the customer (“budget is a concern”) and then make lots of assumptions (“let’s use plastic materials”) based on those ideas instead of actually finding out what the client thinks about the details (“granite!”). As you’re saying, constant feedback is a good way to reduce the risk of “thinking for the customer”.

As a customer having a house built, I’d be pretty annoyed if the builder told me at the end “We decided to use cheap plastic materials for your counter top, since you said budget was a concern – hope you didn’t want granite!”.

Most customers don’t actually have the details in mind when the project starts, but those details emerge as they see more and more of the solution come into focus. So it’s not enough to read your customer’s mind once, you have to do it over and over until it’s almost like he’s telling you what he wants ;-)