A top restauranteur spends countless hours discovering new ingredients, educating themselves on cutting edge cooking techniques, and dining at other top restaurants for inspiration.

With so many great libraries, services, frameworks, and templates out there, it makes more and more sense to allow all those possible tools to inform your design and build decisions.

I call this “possibility-driven development”.

Just like that restauranteur works with their chef on the best dining experience, you should be constantly familiarizing yourself with the latest trends in web development and tools, and working with your development teams to creatively apply them to your business.

• When you see a site or app that behaves in a unique way, ask yourself “how’d they do that?”
• When you read about a new service on Tech Crunch, figure out how your product would be different if you were an early customer of theirs.
• Check out cool front-end techniques on sites like WebAppers, or Smashing Magazine and modernize your app a bit.
• Keep an eye on trending technologies and play with the sites that use them.
• And of course, read ClearlyTech where we’ll be highlighting great tools and trends all the time in plain english.

As a non-developer, you have a unique ability to look at new enabling technologies in an un-biased way. Take advantage of that, and open a dialog with your tech team. Find ways to integrate new technologies and services to make your product shine.

Thousands of open-source and commercial projects are finding possible ways to make your product great. It’s up to you to seize the opportunities.