Well, here we are with the aftermaths of a stock market bubble and a housing bubble. Traditional truths that were formerly ridiculed are suddenly accepted as being self-evident.

Corporate obsession with short-term profits has been a contributing force behind the adoption and advocacy of the Agile Software practices. As I’ve argued repeatedly, customer satisfaction and product success isn’t about process or delivering faster, it’s about creating a great user experience. Customer value is a result of building a great product; building a great product is the strategy; customer satisfication is the by-product. In fact, short incremental releases often result in less customer satisfaction, not more.

In the business of product development striking the proper balance between present requirements and anticipating future needs is an art, requiring a mixture of experience, talent, knowledge, and vision. It’s essentially a function of leadership, leadership that seeks council and then decides. Those leaders who strike the right balance win and secure longevity in the marketplace. Those leaders who wrongly favor the present are doomed to a regrettable future since opportunity is realized when good decisions about the future are made in the present.

You’ve probably heard someone say it, or you may even say it yourself: “You design quality into a product; you don’t test quality into a product.” The last time when I heard those words uttered, I had to restrain myself from reacting. What did this person mean by that? The product was in trouble. It released late and with low quality. Customers were rolled back to the former version, and now the product marketing team fears that if things aren’t corrected soon they will lose market share.

I often wonder why software teams always seem to be committing to unrealistic schedules. You know when the sales team signed a contract with a customer to deliver functionality on a date without ever asking the engineering team whether it were possible. Never mind the roadmaps identify an entirely different set of functionality than what was committed. And guess what? The product roadmaps can’t change either; the sales team has signed contracts on that functionality too.