The spreadsheet is the spec

Every project starts with someone apologizing for a spreadsheet.

It has forty tabs. Three of them are called "final." There’s a column nobody can explain and a cell highlighted yellow since 2022. The person showing it to us says some version of "I know, it’s bad."

It’s the most honest document in the company.

Nobody designed it. It grew. Each column was added the day someone needed an answer and the software they were paying for couldn’t give it. Each color means something to the person who chose it. The strange formula in column R is a pricing rule that exists nowhere else.

A messy spreadsheet is a list of every time the real tool fell short.

So we read it before we draw anything. Column by column, with the person who built it. What is this for? Who looks at it? What happens when it’s wrong?

The answers are the requirements. They beat any workshop, because nobody is guessing what they might need. They’re showing us what they already needed badly enough to build themselves.

Replace the spreadsheet without reading it and you ship something cleaner that does less. Three months later there’s a new spreadsheet next to it.

— T.