> I've never met another developer that observes how their customers (users) use their own stuff. [1] Is it so rare? I've worked with product managers who did

> I've never met another developer that observes how their customers (users) use their own stuff. [1] Is it so rare? I've worked with product managers who did customer visits and shadowed users through entire days and interviewed their managers and their managers' managers to understand their whole job, not just how they used our software. Most programmers don't have firsthand access to users except when they are working on internal tools, and in that case I feel like it is commonplace to walk over and ask to shoulder surf for a while and then ask questions. Generally it's only a problem if the users themselves don't have the freedom to grant permission (like call center employees) or if travel or access to other facilities is involved. (Although you are right that talking to as many users as the author did would required management buy-in for an engineer that needed to push back other work to make time for it.) The author's case is a special case within a special case: not only were the users internal to his organization, but they were doing software development, which is a job he himself is trained to do! There are reasons why product management is a full-time job, and one of the big ones is that learning the users' business and their job roles is a difficult skill in itself. Usually a user-facing application will have a product manager, and in most cases it won't help if you try to intervene and start doing their job for them.