It's a new world of product development. Not that long ago, it took millions of dollars and a team of engineers to create a working prototype of a product. Today, a lone developer can hack together the same code on their own in half an hour. This creates a huge amount of freedom for product development, and a bigger window for what's possible-along with a completely new set of challenges.

No one spends three years designing one product anymore because the speed of implementation means that what you set out to build in the first year will be obsolete by the third. The challenge now is to be almost telepathic: know what your customers want, before you actually get anything into their hands. Cut overhead, ship fast, and iterate even faster.

The only way to do this is to start with the customer.