As a developer (prior to being a product manager), I have been in that situation, when requirements were handed down to me by my manager and didn’t have an idea of the pain points of the customers. As I gained experience in different roles, I realized that it is important for developers to design the right architecture and solution.
“You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work back toward the technology – not the other way around.”
Steve Jobs
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Why should developers know about customer pain points?
Many times, developers are so obsessed with technology and want to try out new technologies instead of solving customer problems. They could be distracted by technology that they want to experiment with instead of using technology that could solve customer pain points.
They need to synchronize the requirements with the technology they want to use. This is something they need to understand clearly!
If the developers don’t understand the value then they might build an application that will not be useful to users and land up NOT being used.
We used analytics to demonstrate the manual work our customer support team was doing. We were able to determine that they were handling 300 calls manually. It put things in perspective as to WHY we were doing this.
How to relay the value to the team?
The engineering manager and developers should be engaged from the beginning.
Discovery phase
This is the phase in which we identify the pain points of the customer. Including engineers or engineering managers will help them listen to problems first hand from the user. There’s something to be said about receiving information 1st hand instead of it being summarized or not being able to ask follow-up questions to the user.
Design sprint
In this phase, I learnt the problems to solve and coming up with important things like KPIs, success metrics etc. together.For me, learning the perspectives of the various functions like marketing, sales, medical affairs etc. is very important to ensure that we are truly building a valuable product. My team was able to have candid conversations at this time.
Planning phase
We were able to iterate on products, apply toggles on our prototypes. Our team actually made those changes to the prototypes. Low-tech experiments were very useful to iterate on. It helped every function understand the value of various parts of the product.
Final Thoughts
Every function has an important role to play in product delivery. Unless they truly understand the customer, they will not be able to achieve the KPIs as a company and everything else that follows. Especially our developers don’t interact with customers, but once in a while it is necessary to share this with them. Getting them in fromt of customers is even better if you can!