Did it “need” to take months? No. This is less about how long it took to get an idea through to delivery, and more about the rewarding feeling of being commited to a challenge.
Don’t let simple features turn into complex problems. Uncover the hidden impacts of adding new ideas before they snowball into bigger problems with complexity testing. Your budgets and backlogs will thank you.
Customer research is not all about knowing what questions to ask, how to ask them, and then getting answers. The gold is in clearly communicating what has been learned and the implication of the insights to those who need to hear it when they need to hear it.