Here is an interesting article from the Information Architects blog involving three different aspects of product development: how designers, engineers, and businessmen should work together.

I’m sure all of us designers, developers, and business people have all been in this position before where we sometimes feel that we don’t need to communicate with each other.  That things will just work out in the end if everybody is assigned a certain task that they’re good at.  That meetings are a waste of time.  Leave us alone and let us do our job!

But no, as painful inconvenient as it might be, for the overall result to have the best user experience we certainly can’t not talk to each other (yes, that’s a double-negative).

The business folks know best about the market, the competitors, and what the current product needs.  But in order to achieve their projected ROI, they have to work together with the engineers to agree on a product definition and work with the designers to make sure that the communication is consistent.  Likewise, the designers and the engineers have to work together to make the interface as a nice and simple as possible.

Knowing that, the process gets a little more challenging when everyone is in different places.  Freelancers or multi-office companies tend to face this problem where designers can’t just simply walk over to the engineers office to discuss the feasibility of a particular mockup.

In MJA Web Design, email seems to work well since we make it clear to our clients that during the development process, we expect full participation from them (for input, design feedback, requirements, etc.).  Clients also understand that delaying feedback will also result in risk that the project may not be completed on the scheduled deadline.