LinkedIn·Thursday, 30 July 2026·27d ago
🎙️ "A client tells me what they want. My job is to understand what they actually need." Sydney De Clercq, Product Manager at DNA…
DNA Solutions
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🎙️ "A client tells me what they want. My job is to understand what they actually need."
Sydney De Clercq, Product Manager at DNA Solutions, in the first episode of Sequence.
One example from the episode says it all. A client asked us to rebuild their scheduling tool. The old one ran on a program from about 30 years ago: a tiny screen, abbreviations, colour codes. Every piece of information they needed was in there, but only they could read it.
We could have rebuilt the same screen, just bigger. Instead we looked at what each type of activity actually required. The result was a schedule where every activity type displays only the fields that matter to it, and where the team can switch each field on or off themselves. That part was never in the brief. It was the part they were most happy about.
🧩 Sydney started out in translation and interpreting before moving into tech. He sees both jobs as the same craft: making sure two groups who use different words end up meaning the same thing. Between a client and a development team, that gap is where most projects quietly go wrong.
A brief is rarely wrong. It is just written in the client's language.
👉 Sequence #01 is out now on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Deezer and YouTube.
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