Ask HN: How do you get your devs to understand your customers?

4 ghiculescu 6 8/20/2025, 6:26:17 AM
I am the CTO of a SaaS company. The software we make isn't software for software developers. So we aren't building it for ourselves, and except for in some niche or contrived cases, don't have a reason to dogfood it.

We have a strong product management team, and a strong engineering leadership. From my perspective, we generally work on the right things, and get them done reasonably quickly to a reasonably high standard.

Whenever I put the word out for feedback, questions, or suggestions for things we could improve on, something that always comes up is "we need to improve developer understanding of how our customers use the product". I'm sure this isn't unique to us.

We have tried many things over the years, I wouldn't say I've found a silver bullet for it. We've tried things like visiting customers in person, encouraging devs to reach out to customers, encouraging devs to pair with customer-facing staff internally on meetings. We've also pointed to existing bug trackers and customer feedback forums as a place where devs can hear the word of the customer that's already been written down. All these things help a little bit, but the general vibe of "devs don't really understand how the customers use the product or why" persists.

Interested to hear how other companies approach this!

Comments (6)

boxedsound · 2h ago
I'm a dev, and we typically ask ourselves what are the customers needs? Then we typically go from there by visualising how the customer would possibly solve their problem today. Then we sketch up ways we could solve their problem with our solution.

If we find ourselves saying "we don't know what the user does today" or "we don't know what the user needs in this scenario" we typically reach out to customers and politely ask for a meeting and try to ask questions that only pry at their needs and problems, rather than hinting at our solution.

We also have metrics and opt-in analytics of our services so we can monitor what the customer do with our product as well.

We have UX designers on our team that really really emphasise this type of way of working/thinking and I think it helps us devs understand our customers better, although it can feel slow and annoying at times to keep asking these questions and doing prolonged workshops.

bhaney · 2h ago
> We've tried things like visiting customers in person

The devs are the ones doing this?

> encouraging devs to reach out to customers

> encouraging devs to pair with customer-facing staff

Are the devs actually doing these things or are you just encouraging it?

ghiculescu · 2h ago
They are doing it a little bit, but rarely initiated.
bhaney · 2h ago
So is your problem that you can't think of any better ways to encourage or require those things? Enough that your devs will start actually bothering to do them in useful amounts?
ghiculescu · 1h ago
Yeah basically. I think we might just be thinking about it wrong.
coderintherye · 1h ago
Rotating shifts on customer service having them serve as a customer service rep for a day 1 to 4 times a year.