Support Driven Development

By Kevin Hale

Kevin Hale, the co-founder of Wufoo and current partner at YC, coined the methodology of Support-Driven Development to describe his company's approach to building products. Everyone at the company was responsible for doing support - even software engineers. The process is designed to build empathy into the development process by answering the question "If I’m going to build this, how does it affect me later when I have to support the user?"

Hale believes that having everyone support the product and its customers is the fastest way to learn the product inside and out. It also aligns incentives between the teams building the product because they are now responsible for supporting it, and it creates easy opportunities for engineers to hear directly from customers and solve problems and pains quickly.

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