Listening matters more than coding

Fifteen years ago I had a client, one of my first ever.

I got the task, I started doing it, and I did it. I was a good engineer, I could build everything he wanted. Spent two weeks on it, or let's say a month, I don't remember exactly. I showed it to the client, and it turned out that none of it was what he actually wanted 🙃.

After that had happened about ten times, I understood the simplest thing: it doesn't matter how well you can code, it matters how well you can listen. That skill is what started turning me from a developer into a lead, and later into a person running a company 🤔.

Everything I learned about running a company comes back to this: listening and understanding are the only things that let you scale and delegate.

I'm curious whether other people got there through the same ten repetitions, or found a cheaper way 😀