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The ideas here are: pay close attention to your user's actual experience with your product; nuanced experience fixes can have big collateral benefits; there's a

The ideas here are: pay close attention to your user's actual experience with your product; nuanced experience fixes can have big collateral benefits; there's a way to do that in the context of everything else. All good, from my perspective. The caveat is that the author in this case is not that different from his users, who are other devs. He gets their experiences. The magic trick for dev is putting yourself in your user's experience when they really don't think like you. Non technical, kids, accountants, whatever. You really have to drop your assumptions and forget your investments and just see things the way they do. Empathy rules, but I feel it is hard to codify that as a skill. There's a big leap before tiny wins. EDIT- to add, the signals to look at first are user complaints, and user's efficiency on tasks with your product, aka usability studies. Empathy informs your takeways from that.

tessierashpool 5y ago
Good summary, but he's not a dev, he's a designer.
- finiteseries 5y ago
  Like many designers these days, they’re absolutely a developer too. Look at their past work!
  - design 5y ago
    I'm definitely a designer first, so I see things through a design lens. But I think that taking the time to truly understand your users as best you can—whether you're a designer, developer, PM, support, sales, etc—is the first step to building a good product and being able to identify these high impact areas.
    - tessierashpool 5y ago
      just to be clear, when I said you were a designer rather than a dev, it wasn't intended to denigrate you, just to correct the inaccuracy in the "other devs" phrasing. from your writing, it was very clear that design was your priority, whatever other skills you might also possess. so I feel a bit vindicated seeing your username.
FalconSensei 5y ago
> nuanced experience fixes can have big collateral benefits For me, little annoyances really stack up and make the whole experience a pain. I prefer to not have a specific feature at all, but have a great experience on what works, that keep finding little things that annoy me
chrisweekly 5y ago
+1 Insightful. Also relevant: beyond IQ and EQ is the concept of "CQ" or Cultural intelligence, which is even closer to the skillset you describe.
agumonkey 5y ago
Basically go see your users. I've seen countless instances where a 2 min walk in an office would have changed a whole service life (and even a whole population by ripple effect).
thecoppinger 5y ago
As a Product Owner who conducted a painful amount of interviews last month, the solution is to talk to and observe your users. I'd highly recommend the Product Bakery podcast as set of great resources for learning more about how to develop great user interview/research skills, whether you work in Product or in design/development more directly. I discovered the podcast after landing on Christian Strunk's blog (one of the hosts) and it's greatly improved my Product skills and mindset. https://anchor.fm/product-bakery https://anchor.fm/product-bakery https://www.christianstrunk.com/blog https://www.christianstrunk.com/blog (I am in no way affiliated with the podcast and/or blog other than having found it very valuable).

tessierashpool 5y ago

Good summary, but he's not a dev, he's a designer.

finiteseries 5y ago
Like many designers these days, they’re absolutely a developer too. Look at their past work!
- design 5y ago
  I'm definitely a designer first, so I see things through a design lens. But I think that taking the time to truly understand your users as best you can—whether you're a designer, developer, PM, support, sales, etc—is the first step to building a good product and being able to identify these high impact areas.
  - tessierashpool 5y ago
    just to be clear, when I said you were a designer rather than a dev, it wasn't intended to denigrate you, just to correct the inaccuracy in the "other devs" phrasing. from your writing, it was very clear that design was your priority, whatever other skills you might also possess. so I feel a bit vindicated seeing your username.

FalconSensei 5y ago

> nuanced experience fixes can have big collateral benefits For me, little annoyances really stack up and make the whole experience a pain. I prefer to not have a specific feature at all, but have a great experience on what works, that keep finding little things that annoy me

chrisweekly 5y ago

+1 Insightful. Also relevant: beyond IQ and EQ is the concept of "CQ" or Cultural intelligence, which is even closer to the skillset you describe.

agumonkey 5y ago

Basically go see your users. I've seen countless instances where a 2 min walk in an office would have changed a whole service life (and even a whole population by ripple effect).

thecoppinger 5y ago

As a Product Owner who conducted a painful amount of interviews last month, the solution is to talk to and observe your users. I'd highly recommend the Product Bakery podcast as set of great resources for learning more about how to develop great user interview/research skills, whether you work in Product or in design/development more directly. I discovered the podcast after landing on Christian Strunk's blog (one of the hosts) and it's greatly improved my Product skills and mindset. https://anchor.fm/product-bakery https://anchor.fm/product-bakery https://www.christianstrunk.com/blog https://www.christianstrunk.com/blog (I am in no way affiliated with the podcast and/or blog other than having found it very valuable).