The Business of Technology

By Gunner Technology

Gunner Technology reviews the business side of the technology industry. From managing client expectations to managing multiple clients, from keeping clients happy to working with the private and public sectors and entrepreneurs, Gunner Technology covers it all in this 10-part eBook. You'll come away with new strategies to succeed at the business of technology.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gunner Technology
• Release date: May 27, 2018
• ISBN: 9780463494226

Gunner Technology

An AWS Partner specializing in JavaScript development for government and business.

Book preview

1 Managing Client Expectations

Managing Client Expectations

How do you manage the expectations of someone who thinks what you do is magic?

As we’ve said here, when you’re writing software, that’s usually what you have to do.

People who don’t understand code might as well think developers wave a magic wand and stuff appears.

You don’t need material, so you’re not waiting on anything.

There’s no physical labor so it’s not like you need a break.

And there’s no physical product, so it’s not like you have to build anything.

This isn’t a matter of respect, it’s a matter of understanding, and the vast majority of the time, clients just will not understand code.

That should be expected.

After all, if the client understands code well enough, what do they need us for?

But how do you actually solve the problem of unrealistic expectations?

That comes down to trust – something you’ll hear a lot from us.

At the end of the day, most everything comes down to trust, which is getting harder and harder to earn in our industry, especially when other companies work so hard to break it.

You have to be able to say to your client: This is a six-month project and have them actually believe you because the gut reaction is this should take six hours or even six minutes.

So when they’re expecting less than a day and you tell them six months, the gears start turning.

Are they trying to take advantage of me?

Maybe they’re just trying to get more money.

Without trust, mismatched expectations can get the gears turning quickly.

To get that initial trust, you need to be really patient.

Now, of course, you can’t take the time to teach the client everything you know about coding and software development, but you need to do the best you can to explain things in terms they’ll understand.

Let’s take a real-world example we’ve dealt with.

We were developing custom integration for an e-commerce application recently for a client who didn’t have an e-commerce platform yet.

The initial budget was small, so we needed to use standard templates to get the core platform up and running to be able to build our integration.

We were very straight forward with the client about this and explained that templates are great but they never get you 100% of what you want. You’ll be sacrificing control for cost.

After the platform was setup, the client wanted the sub-navigation items to appear when the mouse hovered over the main navigation.

As it stood, the sub-navigation items appeared when the main navigation was clicked.

There’s good reason for that, which is that there is no concept of a hover on touch devices so it’s much easier to make the behavior be click/tap for all devices rather than develop separate code for each device.

We explained this to the client, who still wanted the behavior.

The problem, however, was that the code for controlling sub-navigation behavior was embedded pretty deeply into the template’s code.

So we explained to him that codebases have parts that are easily modifiable and other parts that are core and require a lot of effort to