Technology versus Product focus

Software is based on technology and software engineers love it. The most popular subject of discussions between programmers is which platform to choose for the next project, what tools to use, and what development methodololgy to use.
New technologies and methods are heavily accompanied by marketing campaigns that promise many good things if we base our new product, project management, testing etc on this great new invention. They don’t even have to be commercial products: There are people in our industry who advocate common paradigms and free tools very firmly without any kind of focus on their limits.
During my career, I have found that technology fascination alone usually leads us nowhere in terms of business value and making a different to users.
In this series of blog posts, I’m going to point out why we have to pay specific attention to this pit-fall, and why we must repeatedly to evaluate the technology we’re using against its influence on the result of the project: The product.
I’m going to suggest a product focused software development paradigm.
Focusing on the end product (and knowing how to focus) in software development projects, will lead to better products.