The Person Who Used My Product Completely Wrong and Made Me Redesign It

Someone showed me their workflow last month and I did not recognize my own product in it.

They had built their entire process around a feature I considered minor, ignored the feature I was most proud of, and used a workaround for something I thought was obvious.

My first instinct was to correct them. My second instinct, a few seconds later, was to shut up and take notes.

The thing I built was not the thing they needed. The parts I thought were the core were decoration to them. The parts

I had almost cut were the whole reason they stayed.

It is easy to think you know your product because you made it. But the product only exists in how people use it, and sometimes that is a completely different thing than what you shipped.

Have you ever watched someone use your work in a way you never intended? And did it change what you built next?