Avoiding Miscommunication: The Key to Successful Client-Developer Relationships
How Misunderstanding Client Needs Can Lead to Headaches for Developers
Developers working on client projects often face a common problem: miscommunication. Clients may describe their needs in terms of solutions that are not optimal or outdated, leading to headaches for developers who must try to understand and implement them.
One example of this is recounted by Firebase co-founder, Andrew Lee, who explains how a game client used a chat system meant for website traffic to send game state messages. The chat system was not designed for this purpose, leading the developers to create a new “headless” chat infrastructure that eventually became the Firebase Realtime Database. This anecdote highlights how the misunderstanding of the client’s needs led to a better solution in the end, but not without a lot of work from the developers.