Role of Engineers in User-Centered Product Design

A lot of products fail to meet customer expectations because there are too many layers of translation and hand-offs between the people talking to customers and the people building the product. This tends to happen gradually as organizations grow. People are added to the team bit by bit, and a division of labor occurs. Someone starts taking responsibility for talking to customers, someone else strategy, someone else development, someone else testing, and so on. We think this division of labor is "efficient" because we all grew up with visions of factories and assembly lines in our heads as our primary metaphor for "work". Very few of us grew up with innately creative and collaborative activities, like product development, as our main idea of what work is like. We just sort of accept the assembly line mindset as "normal". However, it usually leads to some kind of Frankenstein product that fails to satisfy any customers particularly well. The solution is to work together as a team to navigate the product design and delivery continuum. Working together to discover customer problems, and working together to test different solution ideas, and then working together to validate that your solution works and scales. Here are some key insights: 1. The customer is not always right about the solution they need, but they are usually right about the problems they have. Approach customer feedback gathering from the perspective of a problem search, not validating a particular solution. Solutions can be validated later. 2. Everyone on the team should be exposed to customer interviews, and especially the engineers. Software engineering is a design process, and design must crystalize empathy with the user or customer. Engineers need to build that empathy first hand. Transferring customer needs second hand through a product manager, customer service rep, or sales person to an engineer loses too much valuable context. 3. The more rigid the roles and responsibilities on a team ("I own this, and you own that"), the less likely the team will be good at collaboration. True collaboration requires a sense of shared ownership within the team, even if specific responsibilities appear attached to people from outside the team. What all this really amounts to is that the product is developed as a team, not as a disparate group of individuals that happen to work together on a project. Teamwork is hard, and it requires real commitment, not just from the team, but from its leaders. We offer training for product development teams of all kinds (spanning discovery and delivery challenges). If your team is struggling to make progress, give me a shout and we'll see if we can get you unstuck.

"Just write the code." If that's what you're telling your engineers, you're creating the wrong kind of development team. After building three successful software companies, here's what I know works to develop product thinking in engineering teams: Start with meetings. Not more meetings - better ones. Get your engineers in product planning sessions. Even if they just listen, they'll absorb crucial context about user needs and business goals. Break down the walls. Stop treating your engineering team like a code factory separated from the rest of the business. At Full Scale, we make sure our engineers understand the client's business, not just their technical requirements. Change your questions. Instead of asking "When will it be done?" Ask "What problem are we solving?" Ask "Why does this matter to users?" Ask "Is there a simpler way?" Create ownership. Give engineers responsibility for outcomes, not just output. Let them own the solution, not just the implementation. Most importantly: Kill the feature factory mindset. Your engineers shouldn't be waiting for tickets. They should be participating in problem-solving. I see this work every day at Full Scale. When engineers understand the business context, they make better technical decisions and build better solutions. This isn't just about building better products. It's about building better engineers. Because in today's market, engineers who can think about product are worth their weight in gold. What's one step you've taken to help your engineers think beyond code?

Most companies (we used to as well) "protect" devs from customers like it’s a favor, that’s a mistake The best products I’ve ever seen were built by engineers who talked to users directly, heard their pain, asked follow-ups, and felt the awkward silences when the product didn’t click You don’t get that through a Jira ticket or a summary from sales Engineers are natural problem-solvers, but we waste that potential when we keep them locked in a “room” waiting for instructions from “the business.” Let your builders talk to your users and see what happens They’ll stop shipping what was asked And start shipping what’s needed

We have zero product managers at Orbital. And product quality has never been higher. So what do we do instead?   Every engineer we've hired in the last three years has taken on PM responsibilities. Here's how we set up our engineers to also own product domains:   1️⃣ Assign clear product areas   Each engineer owns a feature or a product domain—like enrichment or inbound, in our case. That means they’re not just responsible for building it, but for driving the strategy behind it.   2️⃣ Let them advocate for customers   Last week, an engineer challenged me. "We don't have scheduling in our outbound feature. I watched customer calls, and I know it's critical." He wasn't told to do this. He saw the gap because he had deep customer context and authority. Then he brought it to me.   3️⃣ Normalize product thinking   When a demo was failing yesterday, an engineer jumped in and fixed it within 60 seconds. Not because it was her job, but because she owned that piece of the product. (Shoutout to Tulasi)   We expect engineers to operate like domain experts and mini-PMs. That means end-to-end ownership – competitor research, prioritizing fixes vs. features, identifying edge cases before they become bugs, and pushing for UX improvements when something feels off.   4️⃣ Create space for contention   As a founder, don’t assume you have all the answers. We encourage engineers to challenge roadmap decisions if they have better info. And they often do. That pushback leads to better decisions based on data and customer insights.   You don’t need a big team or polished processes to build a great product. You need engineers who think beyond the code – and care deeply about the customer experience.   That’s what keeps quality high, even when you don’t have PM.

What's the easiest way to build high-quality and well-maintained features? Add software engineers to the conversation on day one. My favorite projects I've worked on had one thing in common. They weren't thrown over the wall. I was there from the beginning. - I attended exploratory meetings - I read user research after it was gathered - I viewed early design concepts and wireframes - I helped scope the feature This resulted in: - Increased context into the why behind the feature - More time to research and implement the best solution - Greater appreciation for Design, UX, and Product - Elevated sense of responsibility and dedication to my team If you want engineers to do their best work, treat them like first-class citizens. Embrace their feedback and participation in the entire project lifecycle, not just the end of it. Have you worked on a team project from start to finish? How did that make you feel?