If you make WordPress sites for a living, you’ve probably worked with clients, and you’ve probably been through the occasional tough project. Collaborating with your clients and forming a true alliance with them is delicate art. But, this talk won’t focus on what seems to go wrong with these collaborations –– it will focus on how to get it right.

We’ll compare assumptions that developers and clients often bring to a project, and look at how they are similar in some ways (e.g., the excitement of creating something new) and different in others (e.g. features that may strike clients as simple, but are actually difficult to build, and situations where developers assume a content management task will be easy for the clients, when it’s actually heinous).

We’ll also talk about a comparative wish list of skills and attitudes developers and clients tend to wish the other had, and we’ll talk about the anatomy of an ideal collaboration and the sorts of shared ideas and exchanges that can happen at every phase of a typical web product cycle, especially the initial discovery phase, where we identify the known knowns, the known unknowns, and as many of the unknown unknowns as we can.

Presentation Slides »