[rtikulit]

The point I'm trying to make is a corollary to “A committee is a life form with six or more legs and no brain". It's an acknowledgement that sometimes the customer is bikeshedding from start to finish. It's the recognition that rapid iteration can mean a short planning horizon that traps an architecture in a local maximum that won't deliver on business aspirations.

In a past life I had developed 3 generations of tooling to support a certain complex and information-dense task that was essential to the business. Generational change was not incremental and required months/years exploring the problem domain and prototyping and backtracking and intentionally not consulting anyone. If I came out of stealth too early I'd be directed back to a gen 1 approach that was functionally and architecturally exhausted and could not meet the business needs at a reasonable cost. By the time I was done I understood the problem domain better than the business did. (I will stipulate that most of the time this is a bad approach--but sometimes it's absolutely necessary.)

My (aspirational) purpose at work is to surprise my customer with valuable and insightful solutions that they could not have arrived at incrementally, or with their methods, or with their team. Surely you can see how this is in direct conflict with rapid iteration in collaboration with them?