In my years of working with software projects the one thing I have learned is that doing software projects is really hard. Probably zero projects I have been part of or heard of has delivered their value, kept the quality to a standard everyone is proud of, launched on time and had a team of happy people through all of it. Recently, though, I was part of project that did just that. An actual real life professional software project that was deemed successful by both the team and the stakeholders.
I work at Swedish real estate site Hemnet. We are a company of about 50 people with about 15 people working in product development — mostly developers plus a few designers. Being a small company means we are close to management and all fill a bit wider roles than in larger companies. The biggest challenges in our organization has been making priorities and following them through. This heavily influences where we have put most of our effort and where we have made the biggest lessons making, though I think most of it can be pretty broadly generalized.