Bringing people together
“You need to get someone who wants something as close as possible to someone who can do something about it.”
In our Product Management book, we talk about how it’s critical you get someone who wants something as close as possible to someone who can do something about it. Many enterprises today are structured in a way that creates large hand-offs between roles and responsibilities. I’ve seen marketing departments tell product developers that ‘they own the personas’. I’ve seen business engagement departments tell developers that they’re not allowed to interact with users. Everyone tries to own something in order to define their value in the job. The problem is that it creates an elaborate form of Chinese whispers. Each role and department can add value and provide input into solutions and collaborations, but this should never happen in a way that stops developers talking directly with the users they serve. In the modern world where customers are served via apps and websites, and technology is so pervasive, product developers and engineers really do sit at the frontline of serving customers.
Consider
Where can you help connect developers and users together? Can you structure an opportunity for a collection of roles and departments to collaborate directly with customers?
Additional Insights
The art of feedback
Don’t confuse tools with technologies
Approaching quality process with experience-based and exploratory testing
