Ask HN: How do you get your devs to understand your customers?
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!
* management distrust of developers, if your developers need a lot of help to do their jobs management won’t let them near the customers for good reason
* separation of concerns, specialization
* emphasis of productivity, developers should be developing
* assumptions and biases that developers are not people people, which is sometimes completely unfounded and other times strongly reinforced
If you want developers to understand your customers they have to be directly embedded in customer engagement meetings where they can directly see customer wants and reactions the same way your product management learns these things. This can prove very risky due to the personalities involved.
In my line of work developers are completely on the front lines directly communicating with customers. My line of work, enterprise API management, is highly technical demanding a wide technology background but it’s not that challenging. The customers know what their end state is but not how to express their business requirements or diagnose their challenges. The developers, myself included, often have no idea behind the business goals for interconnecting various business system but have little challenge solving for the communications in the middle. Most areas of software are not like this, by a lot.
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.
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?