3 ms·

There's a moderately interesting cultural divide between "engineers must talk to customers" and "engineers must not talk to customers". I've seen "must not tal

There's a moderately interesting cultural divide between "engineers must talk to customers" and "engineers must not talk to customers". I've seen "must not talk" with a product owner who served to represent the voice of the customer, and incidentally take credit for the work he didn't understand and somewhat obstructed. Also the same setup in prototype form where I couldn't talk to customers but also there wasn't a shim layer so I guessed what they'd want. That org has now converted to the former setup. In the current one I don't talk to people who buy our tech but I do talk to their engineers. That gets rather direct feedback on what isn't working, facilitated by both sides improving the same codebase courtesy of open source. Agile probably had the right idea in that engineers blocked from customers are more likely to build the wrong thing, and sales teams are right to be mistrustful of how the engineer may phrase descriptions of the system. The open source backchannel collaboration seems optimal for me, at least in the niche where both sides have engineers employed working on the same codebase (llvm in my case but I doubt it's unique).

bitwize 4y ago
> I've seen "must not talk" with a product owner who served to represent the voice of the customer, and incidentally take credit for the work he didn't understand and somewhat obstructed. The bits of Office Space with Tom Smykowski and the Bobs were funny when I first saw the movie, but as I grew older I realized their eternal truth: people hired as customer-engineer intermediaries (whether they're called "product owner", "business analyst", or anything else) get very tetchy when engineers start communicating directly with their user base because it threatens their job security.
- agentultra 4y ago
  > people hired as customer-engineer intermediaries (whether they're called "product owner", "business analyst", or anything else) get very tetchy when engineers start communicating directly with their user base because it threatens their job security. I think SMEs and startups should avoid hiring for this role altogether for this reason. The dysfunction it can cause is a great risk companies of this size don’t need to expose themselves to. It leads to bad requirements gathering, designing the wrong specifications, and unnecessary work and communication.

bitwize 4y ago

> I've seen "must not talk" with a product owner who served to represent the voice of the customer, and incidentally take credit for the work he didn't understand and somewhat obstructed. The bits of Office Space with Tom Smykowski and the Bobs were funny when I first saw the movie, but as I grew older I realized their eternal truth: people hired as customer-engineer intermediaries (whether they're called "product owner", "business analyst", or anything else) get very tetchy when engineers start communicating directly with their user base because it threatens their job security.

agentultra 4y ago
> people hired as customer-engineer intermediaries (whether they're called "product owner", "business analyst", or anything else) get very tetchy when engineers start communicating directly with their user base because it threatens their job security. I think SMEs and startups should avoid hiring for this role altogether for this reason. The dysfunction it can cause is a great risk companies of this size don’t need to expose themselves to. It leads to bad requirements gathering, designing the wrong specifications, and unnecessary work and communication.