A program manager
Having a good program manager is one of the secret formulas to making really great software. And you probably don’t have one on your team, because most teams don’t.
We called this position a product manager instead in Stuffed Guys, but otherwise, it was exactly as Joel described with an addition of doing support as well (since we are a small company, plus support allows to be closer to the actual users and understand better what they need).
At first I was a product manager, then Ivan. But we desperately needed a separate person for that, who will not program and only manage (these two activities don’t mix well). Hopefully next time we will be more lucky and have a good product manager from the start.
This is more a note to myself to use the Joel’s article as is to describe to a person what we need from him or her.
