In a fast-paced, startup-like environment, the design of the Telco Manager, a web self-service application designed to help companies manage cell phone subscriptions, posed a number of challenges. First, the traditional yet often unrealistic deadlines put unnecessary pressure on the large number of developers involved. Second, business analysts worked in isolation with clients and industry experts while user experience teams (the smallest of all) worked also in isolation to collect user requirements in a setting in which users mattered little since industry experts were supposed to describe user needs. Meanwhile, visual designers are trying to deliver graphics to developers who cared very little about aligning pixels from one image to another. Sound familiar? It was your traditional chaotic yet impressively effective software development environment.

As a consultant in this effort, I was in charge of bridging gaps between the various teams while also participating in prototyping efforts, information architecture, visual design, and pretty much every aspect of the application’s development and with the primary obligation of identifying and communicating user needs, which I was able to collect, in the little time I had left, with a series of interviews with actual corporate cell phone line managers. My main finding was simple: providers do offer a variety of features and services for these subscription managers, but they were not what these uses were looking for. This was the purpose of the Telco Manager: deliver the very features that subscription managers were craving for.