The most valuable thing I've learned in the first two years of my career is how to be a customer focused engineer. But sometimes it’s hard as an engineer to see the forest from the trees in the day to day work.
Here's a list of actionable items you can do to be more customer focused:
Have context to the problems you’re solving:
Hop on customer calls/listen to customer calls/or trainings where they’re talking about your part of the product
Walk and talk to the people who use your product. What do they like about it? What do they dislike?
Go for 1 on 1’s with your PM. How are they thinking about the problems your team is trying to solve?
When developing something new:
Did you come up with the easy technical solution, or the one that best fits the customers needs?
How will you track to see if the new feature is making customers more successful? For example, will users be sending 20% more messages?
Look for opportunities to level up the customer experience:
- If you see somewhere with friction in the product, whether it be in your domain or not, investigate it! if you can’t fix it, bring it up with that team so you can partner with them on it.
Review code and designs with a customer centric eye:
What if there’s an error? Is it clear in the error message what action the customer should take? How does this break?
What edge cases have you thought about?
What happens if there’s an empty state? Is it clear what the user should do next?
(For frontend) Do these design patterns match the rest of the page? The rest of the app? The design system?
Run the branch code and play around with the changes!
Does the copy make sense in your glossary? Does it make as much sense to a veteran vs a new user of your product?
During planning + scoping sessions:
What’s the quickest path to value? How can you keep your iterations tight to get more feedback loops?
Frame your discussions around customer pains instead of solutions. For example instead of: “We need a button to export a CSV”, try “How can we empower our users to move data around?”
Work with your UX team:
Watch someone do a user test of your part of the product, or even better, run your own user test!
Find out if your company gets NPS, PMF, or SEQ scores. What do customers like? What do they dislike? Which types of customers like the product most, and why?
Here’s the most important part: don’t forget to share your learnings. Put together an internal wiki, or post in your team’s channel when you get a new nugget of information. Everyone benefits from the new knowledge!
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