First User First

• Deliver value to one real user immediately—skip the bureaucracy, skip the bloated scope.

• Prove impact fast, then scale methodically through user groups.

• This model kills project failure by making success undeniable from Day 1.

“First user first”

This is my favourite mantra from two decades of delivering successful commercial outcomes—many of them rescues or turnarounds.

It defines the intersection of two things:

• An alternative governance model (instead of traditional scope/time)

• Incremental value delivery

Let's explore this with a few examples.

Imagine we have:

• 3,500 call centre agents, or

• 1,300 international student recruitment agents, or

• 15 admin people generating offer letters for a law degree, or

• 19 depots, or

• 1,100 stores.

How do we deliver a working solution to ONE of these without worrying about the rest?

It turns out you can always deliver a solution to just ONE user in less than a month. Interesting, right?

(This is based on 300 projects with 50 clients across a decade in the US, Australia and Europe—hopefully statistically significant!)

This approach is powerful because it provides governance based on incremental rollout.

These examples were real 12- to 24-month programs.

All delivered commercial results in their first month.

I don't mean "in the first month of development," I mean from Day 1 of the project.

Delivering real business outcomes for a single user gives the team enormous confidence:

• The first call centre agent halves their call-handling time.

• The first international student recruitment agent reduces interactions with support staff by 90%.

• The first law faculty admin generates all offer letters in 3 weeks instead of 13.

• The first depot cuts onsite job cancellations by 50%.

• The first store doubles its weekly mobile phone activations.

It's easy to dismiss this approach as inconsequential—but in practice, it's transformative.

Focusing on just one user initially means you can delay many complex tasks. In rough order of impact (high to low):

1. You don't need to cater for every edge case—just focus on the most common "happy path," usually easiest to build.

2. You don't need full integration with back-end systems yet; the project team can temporarily handle data manually—think uploading CSV files or even manual data entry ("human API").

3. You don't need to build comprehensive admin functions immediately—the team can manage administrative tasks manually or through developer-run scripts.

The remaining 11 to 23 months of work becomes straightforward to govern and deliver incrementally.

You simply track the percentage of users rolled out to.

Note that:

• Each new user group requires additional features for new edge cases.

• As user numbers grow, gradually integrate with more back-end systems to avoid overwhelming the team.

• Likewise, incrementally add administrative functionality as necessary.

I’ve detailed this method further in my case study: From a Flintstone Pilot to Thousands of Users in 18 Months.

When you're ready, here's how I can help:

Andrew Walker
Consulting to for-purpose CEOs to deliver more impact with existing teams and systems - by freeing humans up from admin.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-walker-the-impatient-futurist/

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