Nobody said that building digital products is easy – and one of the key risks to a successful outcome lies in the relationship between the product’s owner and his or her development team, be it in-house or outsourced.
At Keplar we see these issues for ourselves when we’re called in to help a pre-existing project team which has somehow gone off the tracks. At that point it’s natural for the client to blame their developers – and it’s certainly true that the most visible aspect of the project’s problems will be what the development team has done (or hasn’t done).
As we dig deeper, however, we often find that poor quality work is a product of more fundamental problems in the working relationship – in particular:
- Unrealistic expectations – the client’s expectations about what service the development company will provide are plain wrong
- Poor communications – the client and the development company fail to communicate with each other effectively
- Misaligned incentives – the development company’s objectives and rewards run counter to what benefits the business the most
In the rest of this blog post we look at each of these problems in turn, and try to come up with some tools and techniques to resolve them.
Unrealistic expectations
There’s often a big disconnect between what development companies offer, and what their clients think they offer. In the hope of narrowing this expectation gap, let’s say a little about what development companies are good at, and what they are not good at.
Read the rest of this entry »
