Features & Physics Envy
Customers won’t value all the development you do on a project. Some necessary tasks such back-ups, re-factoring, optimisation, improving infrastructure offer little immediate reward. This doesn’t mean you can ignore those issues. The trick is to plan your roadmap so there’s never long periods where customers feel the application has been abandoned.
Scheduling & releasing features is definitely an art. We’ve been trying hard to avoid the scenario described above at FotoJournal. Over the last few months we’ve made a number of significant backend improvements (like performance boosts) but haven’t made quite as many frontend, customer-facing improvements. It’s easy to forget that, even though you’re working your ass of behind the scenes, your company can sometimes appear dormant from the customer’s perspective.
