The Art of Project Management

5.7. The customer experience starts the design

"Technological visionaries can never recognize the distinction between the feasible and the desirable.

—Edward Mendelson

If the best architecture in the world is written with the best object models, finest algorithms, and fastest yet most reliable code base ever, it can still be entirely useless if the customers for whom that work was done can't figure out how to do what they need to do with it. It would be a waste of those algorithms and those man-hours of engineering effort because no one will ever experience the quality of the completed work.

The only insurance against this is to start the design and engineering effort from the top down—from what the customer will see on the screen, down to the high-level components, then down to the work items. As soon as rough concepts have been drafted for what the user will experience, the engineers and technologists should respond with how well what they've been thinking about fits against those concepts. Can the designs be built? What compromises might be needed? What constraints need to be considered? The work continues, with discussions going back and forth between layers of the design, and different experts on the team, making sure that as things progress, the integrity of the user experience is maintained, without violating what's possible (and probable) from the engineers. The design thinking will be moving in two directions: from the desired customer experience down to the technology, ...