Seeking advice from programmers for non-programmers
icey: A problem I've seen from both sides of this fence is that one side tends to over-simplify what the other side needs to do to get something done.A business guy may say "oh just slap this together and you're done", while a software guy might say "just go get some sales and we're golden".I think taking a few minutes to find out the actual effort required to make something happen can go a long way; for both business people and software people.The other thing that I see happen a lot is that business people tend to want to say "yes" to everything, while software people tend to want to say "no". It makes sense in context, business people want to do whatever it takes to make successful sales, while software people generally want to keep a manageable feature set (they also tend to know the full problem domain a little better than most of the business people they deal with; at least from the technology front).Of course, these are all generalizations, so you have to take them with a grain of salt.