Hangry had a loyalty program that should’ve worked. The mechanic was clean, the value was there. But users weren’t engaging, and nobody could figure out why.
The first instinct was to fix what was visible. Redesign this, rewrite that. We spent time solving a problem we hadn’t actually diagnosed yet.
When we finally slowed down and looked closer, the real blocker was something much smaller than anyone expected. One friction point. Easy to miss, easy to fix — once you knew it was there.
That’s the part that stayed with me. Not the solution, but how long it took us to ask the right question. We almost rebuilt the whole thing when all we needed to do was look harder at what was actually stopping people.
Now I try to start there. Before deciding what to fix, understand what’s actually broken.