The eternal battle: Client vs. Developer

I believe that every entrepreneur who does outsourcing business faces lots of issues and disagreements while working with clients, sometimes even with partners during the web and app development process.

Well, I’m not an exception, and I’ve been experiencing these kinds of issues for the last 3 years.

I have always tried to understand and analyze the misunderstanding, but sometimes it was too hard and tricky for me, maybe because I am a technical guy, who sees everything “technical”.

A couple of days ago, I was reading “7 habits of highly effective people” by Stephen R. Covey and one of the points blew my mind. It was the 6th point: “Seek first to understand, then to be understood.” I’ve kept thinking about it over and over again.

I tried to put myself into my clients’ shoes and see problems from their point of view. It helped me to understand their perspective. They’re just unaware of how everything works. They don’t know about such things as a cache in the browser and that they can clear it up from the admin panel which was developed for them. And that helped me a lot. Now I want to share with you some of the most common issues that I've faced with clients and solutions to them.

The most common problem is, probably, with the cache. When clients see something really ugly, they’re getting angry.  They never think about cache or something like that. The only thing that comes to their mind is “What the hell these developers are doing”.

The solution: Be patient and show them possible solutions to their problem: “We try to minimize cache. New images must have different names than old ones. The CSS, js files need to have versioning, after each big release purge cache from Cloudflare, etc…"

The second and most disappointing issue is when the clients ask for some functionality in the admin panel (so that they can do everything without our support) and sometime later forget about it. However, their employees change something from admin, and as a result, they have “issues”. And guess who is guilty of that? For sure programmers :))

- Honestly, we haven’t been able to find any solution for this issue. We have tried several times not to include a lot of functionality in the admin panel, and I guess clients think - “I pay - it means - I should receive as much functionality as possible.”

And it is not surprising, such things happen. When you have developed a rich admin panel for the client and several people use it doing the same task, logically, they interfere with each other.

Recently, while working on one of our projects we faced a similar problem. One of the employees was trying to “edit announcement”, at the same time, the other one deleted the same announcement. And by clicking the “Save” button, the first employee got an error, and guess who was the sinner? No comment 

So what to suggest as a solution: I’m not sure whether it’s a good solution or not, but, recently, we have integrated an “activity log” for some of the projects, and now we exactly know who did the “black” job. So my advice is you can use such a tool as evidence in the conflict of interests.

And in the end, I think that the biggest misunderstanding is that clients think we are robots who never make mistakes. It’s not right. Everyone is a human, and all of us make mistakes, even giants like LinkedIn, Facebook, or Apple have some bugs.

I hope you find my tips useful and helpful and I would be happy if you share your thoughts and similar experience with me.