When building something for humans, it's good to have as many different human viewpoints as possible.
Anyone can code. Put some effort into finding the ones that bring something new to your team. Not just what's on their outsides, but their ideas and what they can tell you about your applications and the assumptions you've made.
For example, does your application assume that everyone uses email? That everyone reads English fluently? That first (or last!) names never change? Or even that someone might not want to be addressed by the name scraped from their credit card? (I am still sour that Panera does this.)
We all make a ton of invisible assumptions every day, it's a completely normal thing for brains to do just to process the immense amount of data we have to sift through. The problem is when we don't have anyone to tell us when these assumptions aren't valid for what we're trying to accomplish, and that's why we need diversity in software. We have a bunch of applications that just don't meet the needs of the users they're trying to serve, and the problem could have been solved for less time and money if their teams had been more inclusive to start with.
// , “It is not so important to be serious as it is to be serious about the important things. The monkey wears an expression of seriousness... but the monkey is serious because he itches."(No/No)
When building something for humans, it's good to have as many different human viewpoints as possible.
Anyone can code. Put some effort into finding the ones that bring something new to your team. Not just what's on their outsides, but their ideas and what they can tell you about your applications and the assumptions you've made.
For example, does your application assume that everyone uses email? That everyone reads English fluently? That first (or last!) names never change? Or even that someone might not want to be addressed by the name scraped from their credit card? (I am still sour that Panera does this.)
We all make a ton of invisible assumptions every day, it's a completely normal thing for brains to do just to process the immense amount of data we have to sift through. The problem is when we don't have anyone to tell us when these assumptions aren't valid for what we're trying to accomplish, and that's why we need diversity in software. We have a bunch of applications that just don't meet the needs of the users they're trying to serve, and the problem could have been solved for less time and money if their teams had been more inclusive to start with.
This seems like great advice for Product Managers.