Your project is going live next month...

or your project is cancelled tommorrow...

Those are words we should all want to hear. It means that what you have today must be useful to your customer tommorrow. The stuff for the day after tommorrow will take care of itself.

If you stick to that, you can avoid building stuff that will never be used. Some of the best developers I've known (e.g. Mark Roseman http://www.markroseman.com) have figured this out a long time ago.

Design and architecture become way less important. Working stuff becomes way more important. So does maintainable code. Feedback becomes way more important. The customer becomes more important. Which is an interesting addendum to Marks blog http://www.markroseman.com/blog/2004/12/engaging-with-customers.html.

So how do I teach this to my customers?