How to guess the client’s expectation

One proposed way to identify the client’s expectations is to just guess! The problem with this method of identifying expectations is that it doesn’t work. Rather, we might guess right some times, but we don’t know and no amount of guessing will get us any closer to knowing – it will just get us more possibilities.

Let’s talk about ‘how’ to guess and why.

The ‘how’ is a little abstract, because part of guessing is to not think about it too much and just say stuff that comes to mind. “Perhaps they will think we will deliver feature x” could be a guess. We don’t actually know if they’ll expect that, but in order to get started with creating the list of expectations, it’s good to have a list of possible ‘suspects’. I won’t go further into the ‘how’ here, but there are lots of guessing techniques out there, the most famous of which is arguably brainstorming. I’m guessing it’s popular for two reasons:

1. It works.

2. It sounds kind of cool.

Whether you use brainstorming, another technique or no technique at all, just go nuts and guess – if someone tells you to guess a number from 1 to 100, feel free to guess for 101. The more guesses, the better.

Why guess expectations?

We will get a list of expectations from other sources than guessing, but we might just get the same expectations that we always get. Guessing will make us think of new possible expectations that we would probably not think of otherwise. It’s just important that we guess before using the other techniques to find expectations, because otherwise the guessing tends to be limited to the topics that were already found.

Expectations that make their way to the list of expectations should be marked as unconfirmed and it would be a mistake to take action on them without further analysis or confirmation.