It can be difficult for engineering teams to put customer and user needs first when they’re so narrowly focused on technical aspects of their products.
But experienced engineers often have a good sense of what customers want, and businesses can leverage that knowledge in the early stages of product development (such as conceptualization and design), and not just writing and maintaining code.
So how do you get a department whose goal is shipping code to step back and look at the bigger picture? In this article, we’ve gathered some tips from engineering team leaders, including four who participated in a recent LeadDev webinar about getting organizations to reorient toward a more user-focused approach:
- Najla Elmachtoub, Senior Engineering Manager at Etsy (moderator)
- Rajat Dwivedi, Director of Engineering at Plivo
- Thomas Lobinger, Senior Software Development Manager at AWS
- Kainar Kamalov, Head of Product at Pipe
Values and principles
User focus begins before a line of code is written.
