Thinking too far ahead

When I worked at a large company, one of the things that stood out to me was the level of specialization everyone had. All my previous jobs were at smaller organizations where everyone had to know broader sets of skills often outside what might be considered their individual job description. A larger company allows for individuals to hone in on a specific area and become true "experts," and from that point of view, as any project moves through its development cycle, you'd ideally be handing it from expert to expert.

This approach has its pros and cons. It allows individuals to devote their time, energy, and learning to a very specific area to presumably become better at it, but it also means that they may not understand the implications their well-researched ideas may have on later stages of development. They may be torn between two ideas for a website interaction that seem equally valid, not realizing that one is a coding nightmare and the other is straightforward and simple code. In fact, when it came to web design, I would say that probably 70-80% of the people at the large company I worked at had no idea how to code.

As someone with a decently broad set of web knowledge, I worry that sometimes I suffer from the opposite problem -- I think so far ahead to the later coding stage about how I'm going to do something, that in the early design stages I may stop myself from creating certain designs because I know they'll be a coding headache, even if ultimately the overall experience/design might be better by going the more "difficult" path.

In the end, I think the best way to handle this is to try to focus on getting each step of the process right in itself, but with an idea in the back of your mind about how, for example, interaction may affect the visual design or how the visual design may affect the coding. Whether that is multiple people on one project or one person doing the whole thing, don't let yourself think TOO far ahead, but don't have blinders on either. It's a tricky feat of compartmentalization but, at the very least, it's worth taking a look at and being aware of how each step in your process affects the others.