Chain is as strong as its weakest link

I was reading some article when I read this line “Chain is as strong as its weakest link”. It suddenly struck me how relevant this is to product development. Working on product at Yahoo! I have realized that product can’t be just pulled in by any one team or person. It indeed is a collaborative effort where different expertise comes together and makes their dream a reality. Every one involved in this chain of building the products effects and influences the outcome of your product. So if the backend team is weak your system is weak; your design team is weak, your communication is weak; your front-end is weak, design is screwed up and the list goes on.

What’s important to identify which the weak links in your product development chain are? If you can identify those then you can make extra effort in those areas to bring it up. Give more time to that areas/teams/person or try to pull in some expert who can balance that team.

As being in design team I can say how important a front end team is. Design doesn’t end by making mock or JPEGs. It ends with the product being finished. So it’s that much more important that the designers and front end engineers work in sync with the other. What users see is not the JPEG but the HTML…design ends at HTML and not on JPEGs. So if your design team is weak make it strong if your front end is weak make that strong.