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It doesn't help allowing employees to be autonomous and self-directed if they never see or get feedback from real users. A large part of design is validating w
by TuringTest 8y ago
It doesn't help allowing employees to be autonomous and self-directed if they never see or get feedback from real users.
A large part of design is validating whatever tool it is that they produce with the people for whom you're building it, and do it again at every step of the process with the intermediate designs - not just as a single upfront gathering of requirements. This is not something that you get from an eat-you-own-dog-food approach.
- wpietri 8y agoExactly. At a startup, it's easy to get outside the building: there aren't that many people inside, so you'd have to be pathologically insular to avoid it. But when a company grows, I think of it like a sphere. The average distance to a customer keeps increasing. At the beginning, most people have contact with the outside world. But when it's large, most people's lived reality is about other people who work at the company. And historically, that worked fine for large companies for quite a while. They were doing relatively stable, simple things that could be easily scaled. But things are hopefully changing. There are a lot of people who have spent their lives inside of large companies. Whatever it takes to rehabilitate them is fine by me.