Client Expectations

Client feedback is integral to the success of a project and as a product owner, obtaining it is part of your responsibility. Good feedback is not synonymous with positive or negative feedback. A client should feel empowered and comfortable enough to speak up when something isn’t right. If they wait to share their honest thoughts, there is a high chance it will cost more time and money to fix down the road.

In web and software development, when we talk about user experience, we usually mean the experience you have when you are using a website or an application. Does it feel like you know where to click to get to your next destination? Do you know what to do in order to accomplish a task? Has anything you’ve clicked taken you to an unexpected page? Are you getting frustrated with or are you enjoying the website or app? Answers to these and similar questions are what describes the experience you’re having as a user. That’s user experience.

I'm delighted to write that last Friday, we announced we'll be trying our first "ShipIt Day" at Caktus in October. ShipIt Days, also known as FedEx Days, provide a time for the team to set aside what occupies us most days—building fantastic web applications using Python and Django for our wonderful clients—and pick up something new or scratch an itch that's been bugging us for awhile. We got the idea from the book Drive by Daniel Pink, and it was also suggested independently by a number of team members.

Estimating development time is notoriously difficult, and when moving deadlines are added to the mix, shift happens.

Estimating development time for clients is difficult enough without having to second guess deadlines. Yet despite the best efforts, if your company has a healthy deal flow, it’s almost inevitable that you’ll eventually have a project deadline shift.