Comment by semitones
3 days ago
This is an excellent strategy for smaller startups, where every individual contributor needs to have an understanding of the customer's needs, in order to develop an understanding of what kind of product must be built. I have much more success in projects where I deeply understand the product requirements (because I am involved in defining them), than those where the product requirements are "handed" to me and I just have to implement something that satisfies them.
Are you saying that you follow directions better because you wrote them... or that you are just ending up with a better UX because of your involvement?
Human communication is incredibly lossy (sometimes intentionally), plus humans will try to fill in gaps with assumed information. The more people you cut out between the message sender and the receiver, the more likely the message is to still be intact.
The kindergarten game of telephone is the perfect demonstration. You only end up with distorted messages if you have many players between the sender and the receiver. If you play telephone with 2 people, you end up with a boring game where any mistakes in communication are immediately resolved.
The telephone game is the analogy I use too when explaining the value of having engineers in the custom calls.
Other than mistakes in communication, engineers often know what the hard trade offs are when designing a new feature while sales and PMs do not. They can ask the questions to find out if a customer is on one side of a trade off or the other. Or if a feature is 10x as expensive to implement because the customer needs/wants the benefits on both sides. Finding that out at the start can save a full development cycle of time/effort at times.
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