People get great software product ideas all the time. Modern software development injects reality to the picture. Agile and Lean practices, test-driven development, customer interviews: plans and teams that are tethered to reality won't float away and build something pointless.
Software teams have been adopting Agile methods for decades. Small teams have crushed it, producing higher quality products in shorter time horizons with fewer bugs and less waste. And yet enterprise Agile transformation programs often utterly fail to produce the business outcomes their sponsors and proponents hope for. Why?
The worlds of software design and engineering intersect and frequently intertwine. The partnership is critical, and yet we often hear stories about how the two disciplines come into conflict.
Software is all around us. In banks. Operating rooms. It runs the power grid. Lands the airplane. Teaches our children. It's in the voting booth, and it's in our bedrooms.
It’s noon at Lab Zero. Soft corporate punk plays on the hi-fi. Some people are eating lunch, talking politics. I look up from my salad. In #deploy somebody has written ‘Everything is deployed. Smoke tests are running. I’ll send an update when they’re complete.’ And I’m agitated. They added hard-boiled egg again.
Your client pays your invoices. You passed all the background checks. But how do you know they trust you? We look for signs of trust from our partners, and we reinforce patterns that increase that trust. Here are some cues to watch for:
You’re reviewing the product roadmap in a meeting and you hear, “We need a dashboard.”
You’ve already done some market research and run some customer surveys. Your product or feature idea meets a real need. Your data supports your decision to build the thing. We’re glad you got this far. When you work with us, we help you tune into the insights and anecdotes that keep your design and development aligned with the needs of your users.
You talk to your customers and you really listen.
A developer on your team is working on an eight-point story.