Get your engineers in front of customers

Are you developing a web or mobile app? Is your engineering team talking to the customer? If not, they should. At the very least, they should regularly read direct customer feedback.

Some companies "shield" their engineers from customers, either by placing a product manager as a go-between or splitting product development into two teams, one "R&D" team and one working on customer support requests and triaging bugs.

Sometimes, engineers themselves are pushing for such changes, because they want to focus on developing the product instead of talking to customers. I know, because I was like that early on in my career.

However, I now firmly believe that if you're a mid-level to senior engineer, you should frequently review customer feedback. Talking directly to customers works best, but may not be feasible in every situation (think very large B2C mobile apps). In such cases, customers should be able to leave detailed product feedback that gets reviewed by engineers.

The real value provided by engineers is being able to translate customer requests into technical specifications, including knowing what's possible and what is not. The vast majority of engineers, at least in web and mobile development, are not doing anything novel. As such, they should have plenty of capacity to actively listen to and incorporate customer feedback.

Don't get me wrong: In the age of vibe coding and considering the ever-changing landscape of web frameworks, it's vital for engineers to have a solid technical foundation and deep understanding of relevant frameworks and the code they work on.

But I've personally been part of "R&D" teams with no customer exposure that evolved into yak shaving, where chasing vanity metrics such as 100% code coverage, perfect unit tests and endless discussions about implementation details became the day-to-day work, at the expense of actually delivering value for the customer. On top of that, once features were pushed out the door, the other team took care of the fallout, making sure only filtered and limited feedback reached the "R&D" team.

Sooner or later, this will kill your product.

That's why you should make sure your engineers are exposed to the customer.

Yours,
Søren