Comments on: Kleiner Perkins’ Michael Abbott: It takes two (teams) to build a successful app

By: David Mytton

David Mytton — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 16:51:29 +0000

Combining design and engineering is difficult if they’re considered separate parts of the organisation but the most successful products combine them. Our designers are also engineers so they fully understand the constraints and requirements of the backend when hooking things up. This is also important for designing UIs that work rather than engineers trying to translate a concept UI into working code.

Designers don’t necessarily need to be expert engineers but having some degree of technical knowledge makes a massive difference.

By: bsmcconnell

bsmcconnell — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 14:35:57 +0000

Agree. It’s important for all team members to have equal input on decisions. Too often at tech companies, the person who graduated from MIT trumps everyone else, and is blind to his inability regarding user experience/design, while the person who studied art is discounted for being “non-technical”. That usually results in crap product.

By: Nicholas Paredes

Nicholas Paredes — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 14:01:42 +0000

At my current employer, I helped evolve a Lean approach, where development, business, and UX resources are embedded on the project team. As a mobile UX manager, my job is to herd the kittens, and allow everybody to contribute. This contribution has created an empowered environment where my designers are moving much faster and development actually proceeds prior to any hand offs of final wires.

Having started to read The Lean Startup only after I began my latest project, it occurred to me that the processes where very similar. What matters most is a common understanding.