The answer

(if you don't read anything else, read this)

When we started the project, the problem seemed clear: build a marketplace to move excess inventory. That meant understanding how they worked internally, customising our tool to fit their needs, and designing a dashboard around inventory data. Straightforward enough.

But when we started talking to the people actually using it: across departments, across countries, across factories… something else came up. The same thing had different names depending on who you asked. What one team called X, another called Y. It sounds like a small thing, until you see the spreadsheets.

Suddenly the problem was how to help them agree on what things were called before anyone could build anything on top of it. And then the structure started to make sense.