Changing the Rules: A Pragmatic Approach to Product Development

Developing quality software rapidly and at low cost has been an elusive goal. Nevertheless, meeting this goal is essential in today's competitive environment where more and better products appear at accelerating rates and customers demand systems that support "what users need to do" in a natural and cost-effective manner. This paper discusses the processes used by the TeamLinks for Macintosh project team to achieve customer focus throughout the development of a groupware office product. Listening to customers radically reshaped the product and led to more rapid decisions, shorter development cycles, higher quality, and greater customer satisfaction.