alt Hacker NewsAnd most people problems are communication problems. Engineers aren't engaged with the product vision or the customer base, and are allowed to silo themselves. Product doesn't see the point of engineers being engaged and feed the engineering team like an in-house outsourcing shop. Sales and CS fail to understand the cost of their promises to individual customers to the timelines of features they're hungry for from the product plan. Goals and metrics for success fail to align. And thus everyone rows in their own direction.
The solution usually isn't "better people." It's engaging people on the same goals and making sure each of them knows how their part fits with the others. It's also recognizing when hard stuff is worth doing. Yeah you've got a module with 15 years of tech debt that you didn't create, and no-one on the team is confident in touching anymore. Unlike acne, it won't get better if you don't pick at it. Build out what that tech debt is costing the company and the risk it creates. Balance that against other goals, and find a plan that pays it down at the right time and the right speed.
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> Build out what that tech debt is costing the company and the risk it creates
How to do that? Genuine question.
And all communication problems involve one or more senders and one or more receiver. The issue is you only got to be in control of one side. And even flawless massaging won't save you from incapable or unwilling receivers.
As someone who has worked in IT support I have seen users habitually click away clearly formulated error dialogs that told them exactly what the cause of their problem was and how to address it. Only problem? They did not read it, as became clear when I asked them what it said.
I have had people who I repeatedly had to explain the the same thing, made sure they got it by having them do it twice and a week later they would come again with the same question like sheep, not even aware they asked that one before.
Some problems are communication problems. Others are actual people problems that could indeed be solved by getting better people. Anybody who says otherwise is invited to do first level support for a year.
This is why I built out a Shadow Sessions program for our internal tooling teams at my BigCo.
The users are right there, go make friends. Learn what they're doing day to day. And how it fits into the larger picture.
These sessions are lightweight, and auto schedule every three weeks with no required action items and people come out of it amazed every time, lots of little bugs have been fixed, and connections are being made.
The culture of not engaging with the end users when they're so readily available is an odd one to me. And you can really get to say 80% of macro picture understanding and user experience design fundamentals with a fairly low lift.
To do this I created a sign up form and an auto scheduler that interacts with the Slack API. The scheduling and getting folk on board is the hardest part. Also finding time if you do things outside the product road map.