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I've been blown away by how little engineers will know about the use of their own company's products, even the one they are working on. It's an area that compa

I've been blown away by how little engineers will know about the use of their own company's products, even the one they are working on. It's an area that companies could stand to do more training in.

ghaff 5y ago
It's a tradeoff of course. The more time engineers spend in customer meetings, the less time they spend on engineering. The other thing I observed when I was more directly involved in such things is that you need to give them a good cross-section because otherwise it becomes "the one customer meeting I was in, they wanted $X so why aren't we doing $X?" See also sales rep discussions. You can summarize things based on research such as focus groups but it's less concrete than hearing about specific customer situations.
alvis 5y ago
This is what happens when you hire engineers who are not passionate about your product. Training doesn't help if they're not engaged.
- fsociety 5y ago
  While I agree, I think at the same time companies prioritize engineers to work as fast as possible, so no slack time means no time to deeply learn the product.
- ZephyrBlu 5y ago
  What does it mean to be passionate about the product?
- sgerenser 5y ago
  Where does Microsoft find software engineers passionate about Word? The fact is most software developers work on products that either just aren’t passion-worthy, or only are to some small niche of people that probably doesn’t include a lot of software devs.
ska 5y ago
Some companies do this to themselves, by isolating engineering and product functions from each other.
- js8 5y ago
  Yes. I suspect it might be a result of something I call "organizational laziness". A corporation wants to do a minimum amount of work to justify its expense and "satisfy" the customer. It is an MBA-rational thing to do. I suspect that if engineers truly knew the competition, they would be motivated to build a better product, which would also take more effort and take longer. So they have to be shielded from doing this by product management. As an engineer, I find this "organizational laziness" (do just the bare minimum) very demotivating. There are many good things that have been built because people were irrational and just pursued them for their own sake.
macintux 5y ago
When I worked at Basho, I realized how challenging it was to really understand the experience of using Riak (a distributed NoSQL database) when it was simply not useful to Basho itself. We dogfooded it, certainly, but Riak is designed for massive data sets that we simply didn't have need of. So while we tested it, we had to rely heavily on our customers to know what use cases were working well and what weren't. To help alleviate that problem, our developers were frequently engaged with the customer support team; I think it was fairly standard that new engineers would start out on customer support. I really envied companies that could properly exercise their products internally.
_448 5y ago
The process is know as "dogfooding". When I was working at a Mobile OS company, the company use to give us new handset every year so that we understand the product we were building. It also doubled as perk :)

I've been blown away by how little engineers will know about the use of their own company's products, even the one they are working on. It's an area that companies could stand to do more training in.

ghaff 5y ago

It's a tradeoff of course. The more time engineers spend in customer meetings, the less time they spend on engineering. The other thing I observed when I was more directly involved in such things is that you need to give them a good cross-section because otherwise it becomes "the one customer meeting I was in, they wanted $X so why aren't we doing $X?" See also sales rep discussions. You can summarize things based on research such as focus groups but it's less concrete than hearing about specific customer situations.

alvis 5y ago

This is what happens when you hire engineers who are not passionate about your product. Training doesn't help if they're not engaged.

fsociety 5y ago
While I agree, I think at the same time companies prioritize engineers to work as fast as possible, so no slack time means no time to deeply learn the product.
ZephyrBlu 5y ago
What does it mean to be passionate about the product?
sgerenser 5y ago
Where does Microsoft find software engineers passionate about Word? The fact is most software developers work on products that either just aren’t passion-worthy, or only are to some small niche of people that probably doesn’t include a lot of software devs.

ska 5y ago

Some companies do this to themselves, by isolating engineering and product functions from each other.

js8 5y ago
Yes. I suspect it might be a result of something I call "organizational laziness". A corporation wants to do a minimum amount of work to justify its expense and "satisfy" the customer. It is an MBA-rational thing to do. I suspect that if engineers truly knew the competition, they would be motivated to build a better product, which would also take more effort and take longer. So they have to be shielded from doing this by product management. As an engineer, I find this "organizational laziness" (do just the bare minimum) very demotivating. There are many good things that have been built because people were irrational and just pursued them for their own sake.

macintux 5y ago

When I worked at Basho, I realized how challenging it was to really understand the experience of using Riak (a distributed NoSQL database) when it was simply not useful to Basho itself. We dogfooded it, certainly, but Riak is designed for massive data sets that we simply didn't have need of. So while we tested it, we had to rely heavily on our customers to know what use cases were working well and what weren't. To help alleviate that problem, our developers were frequently engaged with the customer support team; I think it was fairly standard that new engineers would start out on customer support. I really envied companies that could properly exercise their products internally.

_448 5y ago

The process is know as "dogfooding". When I was working at a Mobile OS company, the company use to give us new handset every year so that we understand the product we were building. It also doubled as perk :)