The 35th annual conference on Astronomical Data Analysis Software & Systems 2025 in Görlitz, Germany

In science, the lifecycle of software products is typically managed with limited resources while facing unlimited demand. Scientific software requirements are necessarily often dominated by internal project specifications and deadlines, but these internal priorities, while beneficial for the community as a whole, do not always align with the individual needs of our ultimate customers: general users. For software products to have the broadest reach, ideally the general user community should be involved in all aspects of the data lifecycle, but reality is that user expectations (and sometimes also developer expectations) need to be managed. As User Liaison for the team that develops and maintains the CASA software for radio astronomy, I will show ways for software teams to interact with general users, even when facing limited resources for user support. I will discuss how realistic support and involvement of users and user groups can benefit both the user community and software development teams.