Comment by aefalcon83

Once upon a time I was doing some custom enhancement for what was probably our largest customer. The CEO and CTO both gave me different descriptions of what the customer wanted. Neither made any sense. I was out of the loop for this whole discussion, but I did get a forward of an email chain at some point that included the customer, so I ended up emailing him directly with stories for those two descriptions plus a third. The customer replied he needed the 3rd story, the one I came up with. This took at least two months to implement, so that was a lot of waste avoided.

The amount of information that gets lost in hand-offs can be incredible. People directly involved in developing the product really need to be more involved with the customers, but I personally have had only bad experiences with organizations enabling this. Those responding here that they get to in some manner, I'm jealous.