Alternatives to customer-centered development
Customer-centered development is when the focus of developing the software/procedure/machine/whatever is the customer: every aspect of the new creation is examined through a customer lens: what is the customer wanting to achieve? how does the customer use the current system/device? what things would help the customer (that the customer might not even know about)? And so on.
There’s another approach that developers sometimes discover as they try to introduce improvements: “No one’s ever complained about the way it works.” This is the sign of complaint-centered development in which nothing is done proactively and any customer complaint is resolved in a way easiest for the developers (if it is addressed at all: quite a few businesses follow the model of not recording any complaints until they have a similar complaint already on record).
Complaint-centered development (aka “the squeaky wheel gets the grease”) is more common than you would think and is particularly appealing to uncreative and lazy developers—or, to be charitable, developers who work in a situation structured by a hyper-capitalistic approach that has trimmed costs so efficiently that the developers face a hopeless task: under-resourced and overloaded.
