This seems to be a poorly disguised consultancy ad, rather than an insightful article. > Most developers don't speak to users Maybe so, but I really don't bel

This seems to be a poorly disguised consultancy ad, rather than an insightful article. > Most developers don't speak to users Maybe so, but I really don't believe it's beyond most software engineers today to spend a bit of time talking to users, flicking through (or perhaps answering a handful of) support tickets or dog-fooding the product (if it's B2C). It's 100% given me an appreciation of what actually matters to the users who are part of the target demographic, and what their pain points are. Sometimes that's different to my own idea of what deserves focus; sometimes there's overlap. At a small company, you often don't have a choice but to wear these hats. I personally think the experience of working with smaller orgs has made me a better engineer in the long run. Larger companies seem to focus on moving engineers further away from end-users and using folks who don't understand the codebase, system architecture or technical specifics of the domain to come up with product requirements.